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And it's absolutely maddening to watch people defend this behavior under the guise of "they are a private company" and "you agreed to the ToS".

nine_k 5y ago
They are a private company, etc. But here it's not what they choose to remove, not "moderation.. It's what those in power press them to remove, aka "censorship".
- antonzabirko 5y ago
  Excellent point, but it's important to note that currently the systems private companies use are little better than censorship. We need a non-affiliated govt agency to handle censorship/moderation requests.
  - pyronik19 5y ago
    As someone who leans right wing.... I have 0 trust in these types of institutions. They overwhelmingly have views that are aligned directly with the far left and they seem to exercise their authority when given it to further their own political objectives. Take the SPLC which is used by some tech platforms to decide who to censor. They wield their power to label people as white supremacist to get them banned not because they are in any reasonable persons view based on evidence have said or done things that are clearly racist.... but its just the labeling of an enemy to fit narrative. We don't need censorship with extra steps... we need free speech.
    - HideousKojima 5y ago
      See also the SPLC labeling people like Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali "anti-Muslim extremists."
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - barbacoa 5y ago
        Years back a Colorado bakery refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding, the resulting lawsuit ended up going all the way up to the supreme court. The law firm that represented the baker is now officially labeled as a anti gay hate group by the splc.
    - antonzabirko 5y ago
      What's the alternative? Anything private and you risk for-profit suppression just like we have now. Removing moderation is not an option imo.
      - reedjosh 5y ago
        > Anything private You don't have to support. The government will take your support at gunpoint. This is the crux of the issue.
        antonzabirko 5y ago
        What does it matter what you support though? Case in point: twitter, fb, reddit, so on
        reedjosh 5y ago
        I don't have to be there, and my dollars don't go to these corps. I don't understand your point. I'm not on either of those platforms, so they're not shipping me ads. I do what I can to be private, so that their data mining doesn't get me. I have that choice. Unfortunately if I don't agree with what my government is doing, they'll still take my tax dollars and fight forever wars with them.
        antonzabirko 5y ago
        Basically it doesn't matter if you support them because most speech happens on those platforms and you are suppressed from there. Sure you can go elsewhere, but that doesn't work when you need to reach out to others.
    - jjoonathan 5y ago
      > They overwhelmingly have views that are aligned directly with the far left Your president repeatedly advocated for having journalists with opposing views shot.
      - rscoots 5y ago
        When did this happen? Genuinely curious
        jjoonathan 5y ago
        Repeatedly, at the 2020 rallies. After the applause died down, he would follow up his very sincere trial balloon with a much less sincere "just kidding." Find a clip, decide for yourself if it's a trial balloon or a genuine funny joke, but either way it's pretty damning from a freedom of speech angle. He has also repeatedly expressed a similar sentiment in other forms, like open admiration for oppressive regimes' control over the media.
        Igelau 5y ago
        > Find a clip, decide for yourself The onus is on you to back up that claim.
        jjoonathan 5y ago
        The onus is on me to the extent that it's in doubt. I was hoping it wouldn't be, since it made the rounds thoroughly enough at the time to shift the counter-discourse from "that never happened!" to "it happened, but it wasn't a problem, because it was just a joke." I guess I'll have to spend more time wading through the cesspool of political youtube. I spent 15 minutes trying to track it down and couldn't find it. It is buried under at least three incidents with similar search terms since last year, but two of them could have had attenuating circumstances and one of them is second hand, so none of them are as singularly indefensible as the statements he made on the campaign trail about having journalists shot. If I get some more time I'll go digging again.
        5y ago
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    All we need is rules about what content can be removed for what reasons, and Twitter can just follow those rules itself, with the potential for audits. That's how we handle every regulatory requirement for companies. Even taxes basically work that way. Censorship is the moderation of content that may be disturbing or cause painful thoughts or feelings. So a person leaking state secrets on Twitter, and the government asking Twitter to take the tweet down, is not censorship: it's protecting national security, or law enforcement. They're drastically different things being taken down for very different reasons. You don't need an independent body to handle either type of request because we already have mechanisms for a company to handle both. What people are getting worked up over now is the potential for governments to abuse their legal right to remove illegal content, in order to censor. Since it's the govt doing it, the govt is not going to create an agency just to wave a big flag when it is doing something bad. That would be like creating a "National Agency Of We Don't Trust The Government".
- dgb23 5y ago
  Not only that, they have been requesting to reveal the identity of anonymous users. There are both attempts of censorship and surveillance/espionage.
- naasking 5y ago
  > But here it's not what they choose to remove, not "moderation.. It's what those in power press them to remove, aka "censorship" Moderators are literally censors, by definition. Look up the definition of "censor" if you don't believe me. People need to stop playing word games to avoid the label of "censorship". Just accept that you're ok with some types of censorship and try to justify the types you support rigourously. That's the only way to avoid a slippery slope. Trying to tap dance around calling it censorship serves no one.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    So .. are we back to demanding that twitter delete nothing, ever, no matter how pornographic, libellous, or threatening? Or even just spam?
    - reedjosh 5y ago
      I don't care what Twitter does. I just don't want the government mandating what it does. If a private company wants to censor, then sure. But as soon as the government requests takedowns and shadowbans, that's majorly crossing the line into infringement of free speech. The whole reason we constitutionally limit the governmental repression of free speech is because we're all made to support it. If I could chose to pay my taxes to an alternative, then fine, but we're made to pay taxes to a government that now can take down speech critical of it.
      - j16sdiz 5y ago
        Counter-argument: Government is (in theory) elected by people, counter balanced by court. Facebook is accountable to nobody, it don't even have any competitor in social network business.
        nybble41 5y ago
        Even if that were "Government is (in practice) elected by people, counter balanced by court", it wouldn't be enough. The people electing the government do not have the right to use force to coerce other people (the owners & operators of Facebook in this case) into censoring content. A government or other representative elected by the people has no rights beyond those possessed by the people who voted for it—one cannot delegate rights one does not possess. And the courts are themselves part of the government. It's good to have some form of internal controls (self-regulation) to keep the other branches of government in check, but one arm of the government cannot be the sole and final arbiter of whether another arm of the same government is acting justly. Facebook is accountable to its users. It may not have much serious competition now, but there are myriad potential alternatives which could fulfill the same function, just as Facebook replaced its predecessors (most notably MySpace). Network effects are strong while they last, but notoriously fickle.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  They are a private company but they chose to position themselves as a public square, open to anyone, with no barriers to entry.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sneak 5y ago
Editorial control over twitter.com is Twitter's freedom of expression as well. Their censorship is abhorrent, but shouldn't be illegal.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Indeed the freedom of speech requires the freedom from speech too. It's as important to be able to not speak as it is to speak.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  I would agree, except in the case of a monopoly, or a consortium of companies acting together as a monopoly. And in this case I would say that the social media companies enforcing the same censorship policies counts. Remember when AWS terminated Parler's account, and then no other cloud providers would work with them? It's nothing new that we require private entities that become too big and powerful to give rights to customers that they normally wouldn't. e.g. a utility company can't set whatever price they want like any other company could.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > Editorial control over twitter.com is Twitter's freedom of expression as well. Indeed. I don't know why more people don't see this; also note that recommendations are the speech of the person, algorithm, or company doing the recommending.
- naasking 5y ago
  > Editorial control over twitter.com is Twitter's freedom of expression as well. That's debatable. What twitter decides to promote, in feeds and other things via algorithms, certainly falls under their freedom of expression. But their "editorial control" currently also extends over hosting comments by others as well (which they can choose not to promote), and that is questionable and arguably could be made illegal. We had a recent discussion on an article by a legal scholar that argues for this distinction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27762145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27762145
- reedjosh 5y ago
trentnix 5y ago
That's maddening for sure, but not as maddening as the argument that it's okay to censor something that is wrong or fake news or misinformation. History is littered with wrong takes that turned out to be correct, fake news that turned out to be real, and misinformation that turned out to be informative. And the worst of all is the censorship of hate speech, because hate speech has become a malleable term used simply to eventually become an opinion I don't like. Remember the whole "punch a Nazi", meme? Who doesn't think a Nazi deserves punching? But eventually, everyone becomes a Nazi, so any violence against them is justified. This artificially constructed right not to be offended needs to die in a fire.
enumjorge 5y ago
The problem is that bad actors can abuse these platforms from multiple sides. In this case the issue is censorship, but there’s also the spreading of misinformation and propaganda that can also pose serious threats to democracy. I don’t know why the anti-censorship crowd doesn’t acknowledge this. In the US, Trump used social media to spread lies about the results of the elections. He tried to pull all the stops to stay in power. This is the same President who attacked journalism, rescinded access to White House press events for news sources that were critical of Jim, and used the Justice department to seize records of journalists. Trump was a bigger threat to journalism while he was in office than any content moderation rules Twitter could ever enforce.
- pjc50 5y ago
  > I don’t know why the anti-censorship crowd doesn’t acknowledge this. > In the US, Trump used social media to spread lies about the results of the elections. He tried to pull all the stops to stay in power. This is the same President who attacked journalism, rescinded access to White House press events for news sources that were critical of Jim, and used the Justice department to seize records of journalists A very significant fraction of the anti-censorship crowd are pro-Trump, or at least right-wing, and of course a characteristic of that is ignoring all these things that he actually did. (edit: the irony of being downvoted into the grey by the angry "anti-censorship" faction)
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    I'm anti-censorship. I didn't downvote you, but you are conflating two arguments. Anti-government-censorship and anti-private-censorship. Myself and I'm guessing many don't actually care what Twitter does so long as the government isn't coercing it to do so.
- rscoots 5y ago
  >Trump was a bigger threat to journalism while he was in office than any content moderation rules Twitter could ever enforce. Besides idle threats to "open up the libel laws" and temporarily blocking random journos from white house events, I don't see how this could possibly be true. Two things can be bad at once. In measurable terms I'd say opaque, coordinated social media bans are the greater and more permanent of the evils here. We can't deflect to Trump forever.
only_as_i_fall 5y ago
Is it a bad defense though? I think that the problem is about concentration of power more than speech rights and the real takeaway is that allowing 3 or 4 companies to control such an overwhelming share of communications infrastructure is a mistake regardless of what rules there are. The argument that we should lean on Twitter to maintain such nebulous concepts as "freedom" at the expense of their own profits is never going to convince me.
- mrfusion 5y ago
  I think the fact that they’re a monopoly is the big thing (or effectively one). Monopolies have always had different rules. My electric utility is a private company but in my state they have to ask permission before raising prices.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    And they can't decide to not serve me because they don't like my political views. They can't choose to not give me power because they don't like what I put on my neon sign.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  I don't want to lean on Twitter to maintain freedom. I just want the government not to do the opposite.
  - only_as_i_fall 5y ago
    By "the government" do you mean every government in the world? I don't agree with censorship in other countries but I also think it's weird to expect transnational companies to push western laws and values in places where the ruling government doesn't want them.
    - reedjosh 5y ago
      > do you mean every government in the world? I do not want any government to attempt to coerce a private company to censor private speech. That said, it's particularly egregious if a nation with a constitution limiting it participates in said coercion. That said, regarding... > I also think it's weird to expect transnational companies to push western laws and values in places where the ruling government doesn't want them. I too find that weird. I don't expect Twitter to act in any particular way. My expectation is that my government doesn't act irresponsibly.
seriousquestion 5y ago
I find that scary actually. Many of the same people were ostensibly for unions and breaking up big tech to minimize their power, but are now embracing the full exercise of their power? Worse, endorsing an effective merger of media and state, which is an expansion of centralized power into the ultimate monopoly. The big tech giants are increasingly setting the boundaries of conversation based on government agencies. Is this not an incredibly powerful tool of censorship and propaganda? Imagine this in the hands of a dictator. We are sowing the seeds of our own oppression.
- reedjosh 5y ago
  Yes, thank you for saying this.
dclowd9901 5y ago
In thinking on it a bit, you could call Twitter a “printing press” of sorts. They have no stake in the content game, per se, but are the means of transmission. The precedent here is that printing presses also held a lot of power in their time to print, which is why the newspapers themselves owned their own printing presses: so they couldn’t silenced by a third party. I don’t think you can expect to use someone else’s means of transmission freely and expect free reign of usage. That just means we ought to explore ways to decentralize distribution systems like Twitter.
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
And to think that Twitter is an arms length away from the government when it - along with every other Big Tech - helped the NSA illegally spy on literally hundreds of millions of Americans. Twitter is going to do what the people in the government want it to do.
not_today_satin 5y ago
I think it's hilarious. I grew up with Republicans and neoliberals using this argument as the basis for anti-LGBT discrimination, but now it's problematic? I have some genuine concerns about what people are calling censorship and cancel culture, but I'm not saying anything for at least a few more years.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  > now it's problematic? I know this is hard to believe, but there are people who actually hold principles instead of just performing them. It's not especially surprising that you don't have exposure to them, but the vast majority of people I personally know who complain about speech restrictions from the left also complained about restrictions from the right when they held more cultural power. Obviously your counterparts also exist, who cheered rightwing restrictions and complain about leftwing ones. But both of you are the proglem: gleefully proclaiming that you have no actual beliefs is practically a non sequitur in a conversation among people with actual moral centers complaining about the underlying principle violation. We get it, we know you (and your rightwing counterparts) exist, as much as we wish you didn't. You're exactly what we're complaining about.
kmeisthax 5y ago
I feel like "they are a private company" is a NO U argument - after Comcast spent the better half of a decade arguing against common-carrier/Net Neutrality rules on the same basis. Right-wingers were very supportive of this argument when it protected ISPs, even though the result was more social media consolidation that ultimately harmed right-wingers. That being said, we do need to be cautious of extending the (legal) definition of censorship out this far. You run the risk of defining censorship to include any sort of counter-speech, or making it impossible to legally moderate Internet platforms for any purpose. "Anyone who provides an Internet platform must be willing to host any and all speech whatsoever" just means nobody will want to host such forums. Something like common-carriage for large social media platforms could work - though it won't give the right wing what they want. Most of them absolutely were violating those platforms rules, and common-carriage won't let them back on those platforms. The reason why I say common-carrier rules would be a good thing for large Internet platforms is because in practice companies like Twitter and Facebook adopted a policy of "let world leaders do what they want on our platform", up until January 2021. This is not at all a defensible policy. If you have a rule against doing something on your platform, why let people in power do it anyway?
- ufmace 5y ago
  It seems like there ought to be something gated around the size and market dominance of a platform. If you want to spin up a PHPBB forum for like 1,000 people around some hobby or something, feel free to ban and censor anyone you don't like for any reason. If you're effectively a monopoly like Facebook or Twitter, congratulations on getting so big, but now any moderation decisions you make effectively controls the ability of people to express themselves in our new public square. This doesn't seem like a good practice - nobody voted for the Facebook moderation team, why do they get to decide what is and isn't okay to say? I'm not sure exactly where the line should be drawn or exactly what the rule should be, but it seems clear that we need to do something here.
Aunche 5y ago
As a private company, Twitter's goal is to maximize shareholder revenue. Without external forces, Twitter wouldn't moderate anything because it costs money and reduces ad revenue. Twitter is just following what the governments and cancellers want.
duxup 5y ago
If I'm hosting some content... I have rights too.

nine_k 5y ago

They are a private company, etc. But here it's not what they choose to remove, not "moderation.. It's what those in power press them to remove, aka "censorship".

antonzabirko 5y ago
Excellent point, but it's important to note that currently the systems private companies use are little better than censorship. We need a non-affiliated govt agency to handle censorship/moderation requests.
- pyronik19 5y ago
  As someone who leans right wing.... I have 0 trust in these types of institutions. They overwhelmingly have views that are aligned directly with the far left and they seem to exercise their authority when given it to further their own political objectives. Take the SPLC which is used by some tech platforms to decide who to censor. They wield their power to label people as white supremacist to get them banned not because they are in any reasonable persons view based on evidence have said or done things that are clearly racist.... but its just the labeling of an enemy to fit narrative. We don't need censorship with extra steps... we need free speech.
  - HideousKojima 5y ago
    See also the SPLC labeling people like Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali "anti-Muslim extremists."
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - barbacoa 5y ago
      Years back a Colorado bakery refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding, the resulting lawsuit ended up going all the way up to the supreme court. The law firm that represented the baker is now officially labeled as a anti gay hate group by the splc.
  - antonzabirko 5y ago
    What's the alternative? Anything private and you risk for-profit suppression just like we have now. Removing moderation is not an option imo.
    - reedjosh 5y ago
      > Anything private You don't have to support. The government will take your support at gunpoint. This is the crux of the issue.
      - antonzabirko 5y ago
        What does it matter what you support though? Case in point: twitter, fb, reddit, so on
        reedjosh 5y ago
        I don't have to be there, and my dollars don't go to these corps. I don't understand your point. I'm not on either of those platforms, so they're not shipping me ads. I do what I can to be private, so that their data mining doesn't get me. I have that choice. Unfortunately if I don't agree with what my government is doing, they'll still take my tax dollars and fight forever wars with them.
        antonzabirko 5y ago
        Basically it doesn't matter if you support them because most speech happens on those platforms and you are suppressed from there. Sure you can go elsewhere, but that doesn't work when you need to reach out to others.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    > They overwhelmingly have views that are aligned directly with the far left Your president repeatedly advocated for having journalists with opposing views shot.
    - rscoots 5y ago
      When did this happen? Genuinely curious
      - jjoonathan 5y ago
        Repeatedly, at the 2020 rallies. After the applause died down, he would follow up his very sincere trial balloon with a much less sincere "just kidding." Find a clip, decide for yourself if it's a trial balloon or a genuine funny joke, but either way it's pretty damning from a freedom of speech angle. He has also repeatedly expressed a similar sentiment in other forms, like open admiration for oppressive regimes' control over the media.
        Igelau 5y ago
        > Find a clip, decide for yourself The onus is on you to back up that claim.
        jjoonathan 5y ago
        The onus is on me to the extent that it's in doubt. I was hoping it wouldn't be, since it made the rounds thoroughly enough at the time to shift the counter-discourse from "that never happened!" to "it happened, but it wasn't a problem, because it was just a joke." I guess I'll have to spend more time wading through the cesspool of political youtube. I spent 15 minutes trying to track it down and couldn't find it. It is buried under at least three incidents with similar search terms since last year, but two of them could have had attenuating circumstances and one of them is second hand, so none of them are as singularly indefensible as the statements he made on the campaign trail about having journalists shot. If I get some more time I'll go digging again.
        5y ago
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  All we need is rules about what content can be removed for what reasons, and Twitter can just follow those rules itself, with the potential for audits. That's how we handle every regulatory requirement for companies. Even taxes basically work that way. Censorship is the moderation of content that may be disturbing or cause painful thoughts or feelings. So a person leaking state secrets on Twitter, and the government asking Twitter to take the tweet down, is not censorship: it's protecting national security, or law enforcement. They're drastically different things being taken down for very different reasons. You don't need an independent body to handle either type of request because we already have mechanisms for a company to handle both. What people are getting worked up over now is the potential for governments to abuse their legal right to remove illegal content, in order to censor. Since it's the govt doing it, the govt is not going to create an agency just to wave a big flag when it is doing something bad. That would be like creating a "National Agency Of We Don't Trust The Government".
dgb23 5y ago
Not only that, they have been requesting to reveal the identity of anonymous users. There are both attempts of censorship and surveillance/espionage.
naasking 5y ago
> But here it's not what they choose to remove, not "moderation.. It's what those in power press them to remove, aka "censorship" Moderators are literally censors, by definition. Look up the definition of "censor" if you don't believe me. People need to stop playing word games to avoid the label of "censorship". Just accept that you're ok with some types of censorship and try to justify the types you support rigourously. That's the only way to avoid a slippery slope. Trying to tap dance around calling it censorship serves no one.
- pjc50 5y ago
  So .. are we back to demanding that twitter delete nothing, ever, no matter how pornographic, libellous, or threatening? Or even just spam?
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    I don't care what Twitter does. I just don't want the government mandating what it does. If a private company wants to censor, then sure. But as soon as the government requests takedowns and shadowbans, that's majorly crossing the line into infringement of free speech. The whole reason we constitutionally limit the governmental repression of free speech is because we're all made to support it. If I could chose to pay my taxes to an alternative, then fine, but we're made to pay taxes to a government that now can take down speech critical of it.
    - j16sdiz 5y ago
      Counter-argument: Government is (in theory) elected by people, counter balanced by court. Facebook is accountable to nobody, it don't even have any competitor in social network business.
      - nybble41 5y ago
        Even if that were "Government is (in practice) elected by people, counter balanced by court", it wouldn't be enough. The people electing the government do not have the right to use force to coerce other people (the owners & operators of Facebook in this case) into censoring content. A government or other representative elected by the people has no rights beyond those possessed by the people who voted for it—one cannot delegate rights one does not possess. And the courts are themselves part of the government. It's good to have some form of internal controls (self-regulation) to keep the other branches of government in check, but one arm of the government cannot be the sole and final arbiter of whether another arm of the same government is acting justly. Facebook is accountable to its users. It may not have much serious competition now, but there are myriad potential alternatives which could fulfill the same function, just as Facebook replaced its predecessors (most notably MySpace). Network effects are strong while they last, but notoriously fickle.
throwawayboise 5y ago
They are a private company but they chose to position themselves as a public square, open to anyone, with no barriers to entry.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

sneak 5y ago

Editorial control over twitter.com is Twitter's freedom of expression as well. Their censorship is abhorrent, but shouldn't be illegal.

arcticbull 5y ago
Indeed the freedom of speech requires the freedom from speech too. It's as important to be able to not speak as it is to speak.
fallingknife 5y ago
I would agree, except in the case of a monopoly, or a consortium of companies acting together as a monopoly. And in this case I would say that the social media companies enforcing the same censorship policies counts. Remember when AWS terminated Parler's account, and then no other cloud providers would work with them? It's nothing new that we require private entities that become too big and powerful to give rights to customers that they normally wouldn't. e.g. a utility company can't set whatever price they want like any other company could.
pjc50 5y ago
> Editorial control over twitter.com is Twitter's freedom of expression as well. Indeed. I don't know why more people don't see this; also note that recommendations are the speech of the person, algorithm, or company doing the recommending.
naasking 5y ago
> Editorial control over twitter.com is Twitter's freedom of expression as well. That's debatable. What twitter decides to promote, in feeds and other things via algorithms, certainly falls under their freedom of expression. But their "editorial control" currently also extends over hosting comments by others as well (which they can choose not to promote), and that is questionable and arguably could be made illegal. We had a recent discussion on an article by a legal scholar that argues for this distinction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27762145 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27762145
reedjosh 5y ago

trentnix 5y ago

That's maddening for sure, but not as maddening as the argument that it's okay to censor something that is wrong or fake news or misinformation. History is littered with wrong takes that turned out to be correct, fake news that turned out to be real, and misinformation that turned out to be informative. And the worst of all is the censorship of hate speech, because hate speech has become a malleable term used simply to eventually become an opinion I don't like. Remember the whole "punch a Nazi", meme? Who doesn't think a Nazi deserves punching? But eventually, everyone becomes a Nazi, so any violence against them is justified. This artificially constructed right not to be offended needs to die in a fire.

enumjorge 5y ago

The problem is that bad actors can abuse these platforms from multiple sides. In this case the issue is censorship, but there’s also the spreading of misinformation and propaganda that can also pose serious threats to democracy. I don’t know why the anti-censorship crowd doesn’t acknowledge this. In the US, Trump used social media to spread lies about the results of the elections. He tried to pull all the stops to stay in power. This is the same President who attacked journalism, rescinded access to White House press events for news sources that were critical of Jim, and used the Justice department to seize records of journalists. Trump was a bigger threat to journalism while he was in office than any content moderation rules Twitter could ever enforce.

pjc50 5y ago
> I don’t know why the anti-censorship crowd doesn’t acknowledge this. > In the US, Trump used social media to spread lies about the results of the elections. He tried to pull all the stops to stay in power. This is the same President who attacked journalism, rescinded access to White House press events for news sources that were critical of Jim, and used the Justice department to seize records of journalists A very significant fraction of the anti-censorship crowd are pro-Trump, or at least right-wing, and of course a characteristic of that is ignoring all these things that he actually did. (edit: the irony of being downvoted into the grey by the angry "anti-censorship" faction)
- reedjosh 5y ago
  I'm anti-censorship. I didn't downvote you, but you are conflating two arguments. Anti-government-censorship and anti-private-censorship. Myself and I'm guessing many don't actually care what Twitter does so long as the government isn't coercing it to do so.
rscoots 5y ago
>Trump was a bigger threat to journalism while he was in office than any content moderation rules Twitter could ever enforce. Besides idle threats to "open up the libel laws" and temporarily blocking random journos from white house events, I don't see how this could possibly be true. Two things can be bad at once. In measurable terms I'd say opaque, coordinated social media bans are the greater and more permanent of the evils here. We can't deflect to Trump forever.

only_as_i_fall 5y ago

Is it a bad defense though? I think that the problem is about concentration of power more than speech rights and the real takeaway is that allowing 3 or 4 companies to control such an overwhelming share of communications infrastructure is a mistake regardless of what rules there are. The argument that we should lean on Twitter to maintain such nebulous concepts as "freedom" at the expense of their own profits is never going to convince me.

mrfusion 5y ago
I think the fact that they’re a monopoly is the big thing (or effectively one). Monopolies have always had different rules. My electric utility is a private company but in my state they have to ask permission before raising prices.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  And they can't decide to not serve me because they don't like my political views. They can't choose to not give me power because they don't like what I put on my neon sign.
reedjosh 5y ago
I don't want to lean on Twitter to maintain freedom. I just want the government not to do the opposite.
- only_as_i_fall 5y ago
  By "the government" do you mean every government in the world? I don't agree with censorship in other countries but I also think it's weird to expect transnational companies to push western laws and values in places where the ruling government doesn't want them.
  - reedjosh 5y ago
    > do you mean every government in the world? I do not want any government to attempt to coerce a private company to censor private speech. That said, it's particularly egregious if a nation with a constitution limiting it participates in said coercion. That said, regarding... > I also think it's weird to expect transnational companies to push western laws and values in places where the ruling government doesn't want them. I too find that weird. I don't expect Twitter to act in any particular way. My expectation is that my government doesn't act irresponsibly.

seriousquestion 5y ago

I find that scary actually. Many of the same people were ostensibly for unions and breaking up big tech to minimize their power, but are now embracing the full exercise of their power? Worse, endorsing an effective merger of media and state, which is an expansion of centralized power into the ultimate monopoly. The big tech giants are increasingly setting the boundaries of conversation based on government agencies. Is this not an incredibly powerful tool of censorship and propaganda? Imagine this in the hands of a dictator. We are sowing the seeds of our own oppression.

reedjosh 5y ago
Yes, thank you for saying this.

dclowd9901 5y ago

In thinking on it a bit, you could call Twitter a “printing press” of sorts. They have no stake in the content game, per se, but are the means of transmission. The precedent here is that printing presses also held a lot of power in their time to print, which is why the newspapers themselves owned their own printing presses: so they couldn’t silenced by a third party. I don’t think you can expect to use someone else’s means of transmission freely and expect free reign of usage. That just means we ought to explore ways to decentralize distribution systems like Twitter.

ErikVandeWater 5y ago

And to think that Twitter is an arms length away from the government when it - along with every other Big Tech - helped the NSA illegally spy on literally hundreds of millions of Americans. Twitter is going to do what the people in the government want it to do.

not_today_satin 5y ago

I think it's hilarious. I grew up with Republicans and neoliberals using this argument as the basis for anti-LGBT discrimination, but now it's problematic? I have some genuine concerns about what people are calling censorship and cancel culture, but I'm not saying anything for at least a few more years.

wutbrodo 5y ago
> now it's problematic? I know this is hard to believe, but there are people who actually hold principles instead of just performing them. It's not especially surprising that you don't have exposure to them, but the vast majority of people I personally know who complain about speech restrictions from the left also complained about restrictions from the right when they held more cultural power. Obviously your counterparts also exist, who cheered rightwing restrictions and complain about leftwing ones. But both of you are the proglem: gleefully proclaiming that you have no actual beliefs is practically a non sequitur in a conversation among people with actual moral centers complaining about the underlying principle violation. We get it, we know you (and your rightwing counterparts) exist, as much as we wish you didn't. You're exactly what we're complaining about.

kmeisthax 5y ago

I feel like "they are a private company" is a NO U argument - after Comcast spent the better half of a decade arguing against common-carrier/Net Neutrality rules on the same basis. Right-wingers were very supportive of this argument when it protected ISPs, even though the result was more social media consolidation that ultimately harmed right-wingers. That being said, we do need to be cautious of extending the (legal) definition of censorship out this far. You run the risk of defining censorship to include any sort of counter-speech, or making it impossible to legally moderate Internet platforms for any purpose. "Anyone who provides an Internet platform must be willing to host any and all speech whatsoever" just means nobody will want to host such forums. Something like common-carriage for large social media platforms could work - though it won't give the right wing what they want. Most of them absolutely were violating those platforms rules, and common-carriage won't let them back on those platforms. The reason why I say common-carrier rules would be a good thing for large Internet platforms is because in practice companies like Twitter and Facebook adopted a policy of "let world leaders do what they want on our platform", up until January 2021. This is not at all a defensible policy. If you have a rule against doing something on your platform, why let people in power do it anyway?

ufmace 5y ago
It seems like there ought to be something gated around the size and market dominance of a platform. If you want to spin up a PHPBB forum for like 1,000 people around some hobby or something, feel free to ban and censor anyone you don't like for any reason. If you're effectively a monopoly like Facebook or Twitter, congratulations on getting so big, but now any moderation decisions you make effectively controls the ability of people to express themselves in our new public square. This doesn't seem like a good practice - nobody voted for the Facebook moderation team, why do they get to decide what is and isn't okay to say? I'm not sure exactly where the line should be drawn or exactly what the rule should be, but it seems clear that we need to do something here.

Aunche 5y ago

As a private company, Twitter's goal is to maximize shareholder revenue. Without external forces, Twitter wouldn't moderate anything because it costs money and reduces ad revenue. Twitter is just following what the governments and cancellers want.

duxup 5y ago

If I'm hosting some content... I have rights too.