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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 rea

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.
  - mikeiz404 5y ago
    I’m curious as to why this was downvoted. Is it because they disagreed with some of the opinions? I was under the impression that’s not what down voting was for here. Personally I think it is worth considering a social media platform, once it reaches a certain scale and depending on how content is distributed, as a “public square” or at least more towards a “public square” on the continuum between a private community and a large scale public one. Your Undivided Attention has an episode which touches on this: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/27-wont-you-be-my-neighbor-a-civic-vision-for-the-internet https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/27-wont-you-be-my-neighbo.... The rest of their series has some interesting perspectives as well.
    - mikeiz404 5y ago
      Could some one who down voted this elaborate on their reasoning? I can no longer edit the above post but it looks like the parent post I was referring to is no longer down voted.
      - shkkmo 5y ago
        Compaining about downvotes or the reasons behind downvotes is a reliable way to attract downvotes. The is expressly mentioned in the site guidlines: > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        mikeiz404 5y ago
        Understood, thanks
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    Social media also has tremendous potebtial for manipulation. If Fox News or New York Times prints false allegations, they and their brand are on the hook. But Facebook can just boost someome who holds that opinion, you would have the inpression that millions of independant people are thinking that, and would never know who is pulling the strings.
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  > Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell It has just been defined to mean 'thing that harms consumer prices'.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    The question is: who is the consumer? The idea that Facebook users == consumers might not be right. Perhaps the real consumers are the corporations that pay for ads. In that case, some price fixing might be out there. I doubt that Facebook does its best to keep the ad price on the level of a perfectly competitive market.
- roenxi 5y ago
  The current situation is technically better than it was 50 years ago. However, there is a big scale that goes from perfect totalitarianism to perfect freedom and it is pretty much always a good idea to be applying pressure in the freedom direction because big institutions (like governments) naturally attract people who want totalitarianism. And the first amendment is a really good idea. It deserves a spirited defence no matter what the historical situation was. Media companies shouldn't be looking to or pressured governments to decide what is and isn't acceptable on their platform. If the ideal is impossible then the question of how close they can get must be asked. In this case the answer is "much better than this". YouTube is setting up for more long term harm than good with its policies. Maybe even short term. I don't care if they like it or not, academics are exactly the sort of people who we should be allowing to voice "crazy" and "dangerous" ideas. This has moved a long way on from when the coordinated takedown of Alex Jones was a controversy. Where is the line here?
klyrs 5y ago
If #revolution getting censored by facebook is enough to stop the movement, then it was slacktivism to begin with. Or as Gil Scott Heron said, the revolution will not be televised. One cannot expect mainstream businesses to support a movement that will fundamentally destabilize their revenue streams. Libertarians are at a loggerhead here. On one hand, businesses are meant to be free to make money however they please, and the market is supposed to correct whatever human rights abuses occur. But the market doesn't seem interested in actual zero-censorship publishing platforms, so on the other hand, free speech advocates are concerned with perceived overreach by the largest platforms.
- geofft 5y ago
  It occurs to me that the libertarian dilemma you mention, that the unregulated market rewards businesses that restrict liberty in practice, is fairly similar to the dilemma Peter Thiel mentions in https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... , that expanding the franchise brought in voters who do not vote for libertarian ideals. He calls "capitalist democracy" is an oxymoron, and implies that the libertarian must choose one or the other. In that essay Thiel advocates for capitalism over democracy, and suggests literally escaping to the internet, outer space, or the seas to be free from democracy and find a refuge for capitalism. But I think the better argument for the liberty-minded is to remain within our jurisdictions and choose democracy over capitalism. The rights to vote as you will, and to speak as you will without censorship, and to assemble as you will without restriction, are protected in our Constitution and moreover are widely seen as civic virtues too. The right to run a business as large as you will and acquire whichever other market participants you will is not protected, and we should stop seeing it as a virtue. Who can say, honestly, that the existence of Facebook as it is today is a victory for liberty?
  - klyrs 5y ago
    > Who can say, honestly, that the existence of Facebook as it is today is a victory for liberty? Mark Zuckerberg, and the millionaires that achieved that victory for him (at cost to the rest of us). The rift here is between individual liberty and universal liberty. And while I generally agree that democracy is a greater good than capitalism; I also see a big difference between the capitalism proposed by Adam Smith and the "shareholder value is god" version we see today. I'm also not too keen on communism. As far as I can tell, we need a messy blend of the pure systems, to constantly struggle and debate about the boundaries between them.
kyrra 5y ago
A possibile solution is changes to section 230. I saw a good approach last year that you can read about here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/washington-can-put-a-stop-to-twitters-game-playing-on-censorship/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/washington-can-put-a-... The key bit was a recommendation from the Trump DOJ, which said: > The Justice Department, which last month announced recommended amendments to the statute, has suggested that Congress replace “otherwise objectionable” with “unlawful” and “promotes terrorism.” Which is in detail here: https://www.justice.gov/archives/ag/department-justice-s-review-section-230-communications-decency-act-1996 https://www.justice.gov/archives/ag/department-justice-s-rev...
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Make that change, and watch the definition of "terrorism" expand out of all recognition.
  - kyrra 5y ago
    Agreed. Terrorism seems like it is unneeded.
- geofft 5y ago
  Reducing Section 230 protections is a giveaway to Big Tech. Remember that the thing Section 230 does is not that it permits you to moderate; the thing it does is that it permits you to moderate without taking liability for defamation posted by users (and other similar illegal content, but defamation was the motivating goal). One forum, CompuServe, didn't moderate anything, and wasn't held liable. Another forum, Prodigy, moderated a little bit and was. Lawmakers realized this created a clear incentive not to moderate, which goes backwards from the intended goal of defamation law of preventing defamatory speech. Hence Section 230. You can still moderate in a world without Section 230, provided that you do so well enough to protect yourself from liability, and you have the resources to fight any cases that arise against you. Who has the ability to do that? Big Tech. Platforms like Facebook will be able to cope with a weakened Section 230 just fine, while still moderating. They'll end up moderating much more aggressively, in fact, instead of deciding to host unmoderated content - because their paying customers are advertisers, not users, and advertisers don't want to pay to put ads on unmoderated forums. (Compare Facebook's advertising revenue with 4chan's.) But it's the smaller platforms, like this very site, blogs with comment sections, hobbyist-run Mastodons, etc. that will have trouble. They, also, won't decide to post all content without moderation; even in the world as it already is, so many blogs decided to stop having comment sections because they become swamps full of spam. YC runs HN because it reflects well on them; if they were unable to moderate, it wouldn't be worth their time. So a founder thinking of taking on Big Tech and making their own, better communication forum will realize that their options are to make an entirely unmoderated forum, something that people demonstrably won't prefer to the options they already have, or to spend a huge amount of time and money on moderating their forums as well as Big Tech does. And their potential investors will realize this too. And those companies just won't get started. (You might say, if this is all true, why was Big Tech so opposed to the Trump DOJ's proposals to reform Section 230? They weren't, they loved those proposals. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/544707-facebooks-zuckerberg-proposes-conditional-section-230-reforms https://thehill.com/policy/technology/544707-facebooks-zucke... Remember that Big Tech is the enemy, and they control what you hear.)
geofft 5y ago
The day I depend on an $800B corporation whose customers are other corporations and for whom my personal data is just an asset, in order to be able to speak and organize, is the day I am no longer free. No law (Facebook's revenue in 2020 was more than twice the entire US Department of Justice's budget) nor good intention on the part of anyone currently in a leadership role at Facebook can in any meaningful way prevent them from abusing their position, if they want to. Certainly, convincing people in Facebook's leadership to do the right thing right now is not a meaningful solution. I agree with you that the problem is market forces. If you tell people that they are free to make as much money as they want in any way they want, the natural, profitable result is the conglomeration of power. The invisible hand will scoop up everything into one big corporation. Even conventional antitrust law - the thing that prevents Big Tech from becoming a single overarching entity - is an admission that "market forces" are not actually good for society. I'm a fan of proposals like this to address not only the serious danger of Big Tech but the ongoing danger that the market will create further monstrosities in the future: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...
throwaway6734 5y ago
Don't use facebook
- trompetenaccoun 5y ago
  Not an argument. Twitter heavily censors, as does Reddit. Even picture sites like Instagram "editorialize" user submissions. There isn't anywhere to go anymore, the internet has become unfree.
  - throwaway6734 5y ago
    Don't use any of those sites then. The internet is more than them
rhizome 5y ago
I know this isn't the simplest solution, but the only solution is to stop giving them your speech. If a child lights something on fire every time they get their hands on a book of matches (dating myself perhaps), you stop giving them matches. You're right if you bring up the fact that we've never had to deal with the entire neighborhood supplying the kid with matches, but I think my point stands. We can only control our own (re)actions. And don't be mistaken: the "freedom" sites fired up as First Amendment outposts to service nazis who got kicked off of mainstream services by corporate overlords, they're "censoring" too: https://www.rawstory.com/baked-alaska-trump/ https://www.rawstory.com/baked-alaska-trump/
- olmecs 5y ago
  "to service nazis who got kicked off of mainstream services" People you don't agree with are nazis? You are the lowest form of troll.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    There are actual factual nazis. Not everybody on the far right is this way, of course. But it isn’t like people are being branded as such when nobody is displaying swastikas.
  - rhizome 5y ago
    >People you don't agree with are nazis? You apparently need practice in reading comprehension. But I do find a lot to agree with in reasonable people, so sure, I could defend that accusation for s&g's.
smaryjerry 5y ago
If it was one site it wouldn’t be an issue, but these companies actually cooperate, work together, or hire the same third parties to coordinate bans that span not just one or two companies, but all of the major companies and sometimes including payment processors, all in the same strike. That is the easiest way for them to avoid blowback, when the person has lost all forms of communication at once.

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.
- mikeiz404 5y ago
  I’m curious as to why this was downvoted. Is it because they disagreed with some of the opinions? I was under the impression that’s not what down voting was for here. Personally I think it is worth considering a social media platform, once it reaches a certain scale and depending on how content is distributed, as a “public square” or at least more towards a “public square” on the continuum between a private community and a large scale public one. Your Undivided Attention has an episode which touches on this: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/27-wont-you-be-my-neighbor-a-civic-vision-for-the-internet https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/27-wont-you-be-my-neighbo.... The rest of their series has some interesting perspectives as well.
  - mikeiz404 5y ago
    Could some one who down voted this elaborate on their reasoning? I can no longer edit the above post but it looks like the parent post I was referring to is no longer down voted.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      Compaining about downvotes or the reasons behind downvotes is a reliable way to attract downvotes. The is expressly mentioned in the site guidlines: > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - mikeiz404 5y ago
        Understood, thanks
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  Social media also has tremendous potebtial for manipulation. If Fox News or New York Times prints false allegations, they and their brand are on the hook. But Facebook can just boost someome who holds that opinion, you would have the inpression that millions of independant people are thinking that, and would never know who is pulling the strings.
kingsuper20 5y ago
> Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell It has just been defined to mean 'thing that harms consumer prices'.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  The question is: who is the consumer? The idea that Facebook users == consumers might not be right. Perhaps the real consumers are the corporations that pay for ads. In that case, some price fixing might be out there. I doubt that Facebook does its best to keep the ad price on the level of a perfectly competitive market.
roenxi 5y ago
The current situation is technically better than it was 50 years ago. However, there is a big scale that goes from perfect totalitarianism to perfect freedom and it is pretty much always a good idea to be applying pressure in the freedom direction because big institutions (like governments) naturally attract people who want totalitarianism. And the first amendment is a really good idea. It deserves a spirited defence no matter what the historical situation was. Media companies shouldn't be looking to or pressured governments to decide what is and isn't acceptable on their platform. If the ideal is impossible then the question of how close they can get must be asked. In this case the answer is "much better than this". YouTube is setting up for more long term harm than good with its policies. Maybe even short term. I don't care if they like it or not, academics are exactly the sort of people who we should be allowing to voice "crazy" and "dangerous" ideas. This has moved a long way on from when the coordinated takedown of Alex Jones was a controversy. Where is the line here?

klyrs 5y ago

If #revolution getting censored by facebook is enough to stop the movement, then it was slacktivism to begin with. Or as Gil Scott Heron said, the revolution will not be televised. One cannot expect mainstream businesses to support a movement that will fundamentally destabilize their revenue streams. Libertarians are at a loggerhead here. On one hand, businesses are meant to be free to make money however they please, and the market is supposed to correct whatever human rights abuses occur. But the market doesn't seem interested in actual zero-censorship publishing platforms, so on the other hand, free speech advocates are concerned with perceived overreach by the largest platforms.

geofft 5y ago
It occurs to me that the libertarian dilemma you mention, that the unregulated market rewards businesses that restrict liberty in practice, is fairly similar to the dilemma Peter Thiel mentions in https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... , that expanding the franchise brought in voters who do not vote for libertarian ideals. He calls "capitalist democracy" is an oxymoron, and implies that the libertarian must choose one or the other. In that essay Thiel advocates for capitalism over democracy, and suggests literally escaping to the internet, outer space, or the seas to be free from democracy and find a refuge for capitalism. But I think the better argument for the liberty-minded is to remain within our jurisdictions and choose democracy over capitalism. The rights to vote as you will, and to speak as you will without censorship, and to assemble as you will without restriction, are protected in our Constitution and moreover are widely seen as civic virtues too. The right to run a business as large as you will and acquire whichever other market participants you will is not protected, and we should stop seeing it as a virtue. Who can say, honestly, that the existence of Facebook as it is today is a victory for liberty?
- klyrs 5y ago
  > Who can say, honestly, that the existence of Facebook as it is today is a victory for liberty? Mark Zuckerberg, and the millionaires that achieved that victory for him (at cost to the rest of us). The rift here is between individual liberty and universal liberty. And while I generally agree that democracy is a greater good than capitalism; I also see a big difference between the capitalism proposed by Adam Smith and the "shareholder value is god" version we see today. I'm also not too keen on communism. As far as I can tell, we need a messy blend of the pure systems, to constantly struggle and debate about the boundaries between them.

kyrra 5y ago

A possibile solution is changes to section 230. I saw a good approach last year that you can read about here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/washington-can-put-a-stop-to-twitters-game-playing-on-censorship/ https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/washington-can-put-a-... The key bit was a recommendation from the Trump DOJ, which said: > The Justice Department, which last month announced recommended amendments to the statute, has suggested that Congress replace “otherwise objectionable” with “unlawful” and “promotes terrorism.” Which is in detail here: https://www.justice.gov/archives/ag/department-justice-s-review-section-230-communications-decency-act-1996 https://www.justice.gov/archives/ag/department-justice-s-rev...

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Make that change, and watch the definition of "terrorism" expand out of all recognition.
- kyrra 5y ago
  Agreed. Terrorism seems like it is unneeded.
geofft 5y ago
Reducing Section 230 protections is a giveaway to Big Tech. Remember that the thing Section 230 does is not that it permits you to moderate; the thing it does is that it permits you to moderate without taking liability for defamation posted by users (and other similar illegal content, but defamation was the motivating goal). One forum, CompuServe, didn't moderate anything, and wasn't held liable. Another forum, Prodigy, moderated a little bit and was. Lawmakers realized this created a clear incentive not to moderate, which goes backwards from the intended goal of defamation law of preventing defamatory speech. Hence Section 230. You can still moderate in a world without Section 230, provided that you do so well enough to protect yourself from liability, and you have the resources to fight any cases that arise against you. Who has the ability to do that? Big Tech. Platforms like Facebook will be able to cope with a weakened Section 230 just fine, while still moderating. They'll end up moderating much more aggressively, in fact, instead of deciding to host unmoderated content - because their paying customers are advertisers, not users, and advertisers don't want to pay to put ads on unmoderated forums. (Compare Facebook's advertising revenue with 4chan's.) But it's the smaller platforms, like this very site, blogs with comment sections, hobbyist-run Mastodons, etc. that will have trouble. They, also, won't decide to post all content without moderation; even in the world as it already is, so many blogs decided to stop having comment sections because they become swamps full of spam. YC runs HN because it reflects well on them; if they were unable to moderate, it wouldn't be worth their time. So a founder thinking of taking on Big Tech and making their own, better communication forum will realize that their options are to make an entirely unmoderated forum, something that people demonstrably won't prefer to the options they already have, or to spend a huge amount of time and money on moderating their forums as well as Big Tech does. And their potential investors will realize this too. And those companies just won't get started. (You might say, if this is all true, why was Big Tech so opposed to the Trump DOJ's proposals to reform Section 230? They weren't, they loved those proposals. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/544707-facebooks-zuckerberg-proposes-conditional-section-230-reforms https://thehill.com/policy/technology/544707-facebooks-zucke... Remember that Big Tech is the enemy, and they control what you hear.)

geofft 5y ago

The day I depend on an $800B corporation whose customers are other corporations and for whom my personal data is just an asset, in order to be able to speak and organize, is the day I am no longer free. No law (Facebook's revenue in 2020 was more than twice the entire US Department of Justice's budget) nor good intention on the part of anyone currently in a leadership role at Facebook can in any meaningful way prevent them from abusing their position, if they want to. Certainly, convincing people in Facebook's leadership to do the right thing right now is not a meaningful solution. I agree with you that the problem is market forces. If you tell people that they are free to make as much money as they want in any way they want, the natural, profitable result is the conglomeration of power. The invisible hand will scoop up everything into one big corporation. Even conventional antitrust law - the thing that prevents Big Tech from becoming a single overarching entity - is an admission that "market forces" are not actually good for society. I'm a fan of proposals like this to address not only the serious danger of Big Tech but the ongoing danger that the market will create further monstrosities in the future: https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big-tech-9ad9e0da324c https://medium.com/@teamwarren/heres-how-we-can-break-up-big...

throwaway6734 5y ago

Don't use facebook

trompetenaccoun 5y ago
Not an argument. Twitter heavily censors, as does Reddit. Even picture sites like Instagram "editorialize" user submissions. There isn't anywhere to go anymore, the internet has become unfree.
- throwaway6734 5y ago
  Don't use any of those sites then. The internet is more than them

rhizome 5y ago

I know this isn't the simplest solution, but the only solution is to stop giving them your speech. If a child lights something on fire every time they get their hands on a book of matches (dating myself perhaps), you stop giving them matches. You're right if you bring up the fact that we've never had to deal with the entire neighborhood supplying the kid with matches, but I think my point stands. We can only control our own (re)actions. And don't be mistaken: the "freedom" sites fired up as First Amendment outposts to service nazis who got kicked off of mainstream services by corporate overlords, they're "censoring" too: https://www.rawstory.com/baked-alaska-trump/ https://www.rawstory.com/baked-alaska-trump/

olmecs 5y ago
"to service nazis who got kicked off of mainstream services" People you don't agree with are nazis? You are the lowest form of troll.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  There are actual factual nazis. Not everybody on the far right is this way, of course. But it isn’t like people are being branded as such when nobody is displaying swastikas.
- rhizome 5y ago
  >People you don't agree with are nazis? You apparently need practice in reading comprehension. But I do find a lot to agree with in reasonable people, so sure, I could defend that accusation for s&g's.

smaryjerry 5y ago

If it was one site it wouldn’t be an issue, but these companies actually cooperate, work together, or hire the same third parties to coordinate bans that span not just one or two companies, but all of the major companies and sometimes including payment processors, all in the same strike. That is the easiest way for them to avoid blowback, when the person has lost all forms of communication at once.