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> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like Please, speak for yourself. I think these companies should host

> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like Please, speak for yourself. I think these companies should host absolutely everything[0]. Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.

landryraccoon 5y ago
That's your choice. Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars? I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. That doesn't mean other companies can't host that data, simply that I don't want any of my dollars to go to those companies. If the vast majority of consumers also don't want to give money to companies that host that content, that's the hosting company's problem. The free market is speaking. Nobody is making it illegal for that data to be hosted, but nobody is obliged to pay for it to be hosted. So it seems to me that things are working as intended.
- teh_infallible 5y ago
  I think the whole concept of “voting with your dollars” is flawed. Google will always have more votes than you.
  - derek_codes 5y ago
    What? So because someone or something has more money than us, we should just say screw it and buy products we are morally against? That makes no sense.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    The analogy to voting to flawed in that actual voting is much too powerful, because it involves politics and the use of force. When you "vote" with your dollars your choices are to either support something or ignore it and spend your money somewhere else. The amount of support you can provide is limited by the economic surplus you've created, and no matter how much money you amass you can't just shut down something you dislike as long as other people continue to support it. Voting in the political sense lacks these safeguards: a majority (or vocal minority) can subsidize their pet projects with the opposition's resources, or prohibit harmless activities merely because they find them distasteful.
- jlawson 5y ago
  No, because just a handful of companies control the entire ecosystem. There is no alternative, you cannot escape their influence and you cannot function without interacting with them. If Google and Apple ban you from their products and platforms, and Visa shuts down your payment processing, there is nowhere to go. You're done. This and much more has happened many times. You're making the "just build your own internet bro" argument.
  - mason55 5y ago
    But I think we need to examine both sides of this. When the American concept of free speech was coined, it was valuable because you could go stand in a government owned square and communicate your message for free. It was a good balance between not forcing private companies to accept speech but still allowing the speech to happen. Online we don't have the concept of a government run square, and so your speech can be totally stifled by private companies. But the difference is that when you're standing in the town square shouting nonsense, your reach is constrained, your ability to reproduce your speech is low (you have to just stand there and keep shouting) and everyone knows who you are. Damaging speech just can't be that damaging. Online is totally different. I think the argument of "Google can't censor you, only the government can" is not great because there's no gov't equivalent of the town square. But I don't think the answer is just "make Google accept all speech" or "create a gov't equivalent of the town square" is necessarily the answer either. I think we should be starting from first principles and understand what free speech is trying to accomplish and come up with a framework that helps us accomplish it.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      The history of printing things for wide scale distribution well predates the first amendment and it is silly to pretend otherwise.
      - inlined 5y ago
        But the history of forcing those publications to host your opinion is unprecedented
- acituan 5y ago
  We’re not talking about individual choice but an inherent ir/rationality in censorious behavior. Vast majority of the consumers probably make pragmatic rather than idealistic consumption choices. Eg when you source a new iPhone, you source certain unethical labor practices. When you make use of the US dollar, you make use of some amount of atrocities that built its international purchasing power (eg any of the petrodollar wars). I bet those rarely bother even the most so-called “idealistic” consumers because a) it is a hard calculus to compute b) it is impossible to live when every “impure” thing is removed from use. The difference with public content hosting is being able to twist arms to make them take down stuff and conform to an image of virtuousness which we narcissistically and psuedo-religiously identify with. It is not about the real damage the contents pose, it is our intolerance to being seen as a “person who can use such sites”. The threat is to our confirmation bias, in this case the confirmation of an idea that there is a clear right and wrong and we are definitely right.
  - landryraccoon 5y ago
    I'm confused. I don't see the problem. What's the difference between the image of virtue and just virtue? If the majority of people believe that images of virtuousness are what they want, then that's just what they want. People aren't computing the outcome, their ethics are based on appearances and always have been. The internet doesn't change that fact. Whether it was in the middle ages or the post-industrial period or today, virtue has always been performative. So I don't really see what you think your argument demonstrates.
    - acituan 5y ago
      > What's the difference between the image of virtue and just virtue? What’s the difference between a real car and a perfect cardboard replica? One has functionality and interiority. The other is just exteriority. In the King Midas story, he wants everything to be mindlessly golden and thus turns them into unusable shiny crap. He got the golden exterior alright, with none of the real goldenness, goodness they would afford him.
      - 5y ago
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  There is no free market in big tech.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    There's little free market for the consumers in tech in general. The barriers to entry are extreme - between inherent complexity of the products, enormous capital investments required, and scale-related benefits (economies of scale, network effects), few can afford to start a real competitor. You can't just make a new Facebook or a new smartphone or even a new coffee machine - not without making a faustian bargain with investors, a deal which is usually the root problem behind why technology sucks. Consumers only get to choose out of what's available, and in this market, it's hard for an entrepreneurial consumer to make some things available when the market isn't providing them.
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  > I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. Isn't that a sign of a moral panic? Back in the 90s, my parents didn't want to patronize companies that signed deals with pornographers. Even though I was only 10, that sounded ridiculous. Good luck finding any large company that doesn't.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    If people wont do business with people who do business with pornographers what right do the pornographers or porn aficionados have to object. If it would render it more clear it wouldn't matter if the subject were avocados. It's not a moral judgement on the worthiness of porn its about consumer choice in aggregate.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    Can you explain this? Are you referring to tech only? Maybe I’m way too oblivious but of the large companies I pay money to I find it hard to imagine that most are signing deals with pornographers.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    Did the local utilities (water, electric) refuse them to pornographers, and did you parents boycott those?
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    Just how many modern companies do you think are actively dealing in pornography?
  - landryraccoon 5y ago
    I don’t see what’s changed. Youtube doesn’t host pornographic content either. The Apple App store doesn’t allow adult content of any kind. If you’re saying maybe Youtube and the Apple store should grow up a little and allow adult content I’m sympathetic but the horse has long left the barn on that one.
    - eurasiantiger 5y ago
- 13of40 5y ago
  The impact of that is asymmetrical, though. A company that's making 1% profit (thinking a rural TV station here, not necessarily Google) can't afford to lose 10% of it's viewers, so they dial down their programming to the least objectionable possible. That's how we get in a situation where most people want to watch Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones but what they get are Brady Bunch reruns.
- madmax96 5y ago
  That is the point of the free market. But deplatforming certain kinds of offensive content is regressive. For instance, in the not-so-distant past many Americans found interracial marriage morally abhorrent. Wikipedia says only 5% of Americans thought interracial marriage should be legal in the 1950s. In today’s environment, that leads to deplatforming those who would’ve supported marriage equality. This is not something we would desire. People are full of prejudices. I’m sure our grandchildren will look back in horror at ours. Let’s not deplatform them for that.
  - obedm 5y ago
    I always think I can draw the line in the sand as a very rational and relatively well read person. But then I remember that the best thinkers the world has ever seen (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, ad nauseum) were never able to look beyond their noses to see the human suffering of others. Aka, they were perfectly happy to have a society run by slaves, to ignore the plight of the poor and sick, etc.
    - jjeaff 5y ago
      That may be true of Plato, Aristotle, etc. But one thing I have learned from history is that there is almost always a contingent of people that do find terrible things like slavery abhorrent and were even outspoken about it. But if you are an elite, and benefit greatly from something, you are probably much less likely to be outspoken against it.
      - obedm 5y ago
        I've never heard of any ancient philosopher being abhorrent about slavery and the like and I've read that there weren't any. Could you point to some readings if you're aware of it? I'd love to know
        MatteoFrigo 5y ago
        Seneca had a somewhat more humane attitude towards slavery. See e.g. https://figsinwinter.medium.com/seneca-to-lucilius-47-on-slaves-and-human-beings-f13602f62b46 https://figsinwinter.medium.com/seneca-to-lucilius-47-on-sla...
- ineptech 5y ago
  > Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars? Can you pinpoint the moral difference between "Google should be allowed to refuse to host content that they dislike" and "Restaurants should be allowed to refuse to serve ethnicities that they dislike"? It is a feature of free markets that consumers choose where to spend their money; but it is also a feature of liberal societies that the law precludes the majority from driving out an unpopular minority by refusing to do business with them.
gcanyon 5y ago
This is reasonable as an ideal, but could be harmful in practice. A significant percentage of the U.S. population believes inarguably wrong and demonstrably dangerous things at this point. It is possible that the only effective way to fix that is corporate censorship. That wouldn’t make me happy, but I’m not going to agree with letting a crazy person steer the Titanic into an iceberg just because it’s their right to do so.
- lenkite 5y ago
  Until they commit crimes and are formally charged and prosecuted in a court of law, they can believe anything they like.
- LudwigNagasena 5y ago
  Well, remove their voting rights then if you think that they are too stupid. Why should I be the one who suffers?
- native_samples 5y ago
  Ah, but how do you know you're not the one believing crazy wrong and dangerous things? All those terms are highly relative and if your answer is argument by authority, well ...
  - prox 5y ago
    Because there are an awful lot of knowledge domains where there is consensus among experts, and one can verify their own knowledge along those lines.
    - wtetzner 5y ago
      The consensus of experts has been wrong many times throughout history.
      - prox 5y ago
        1)depends on the domain 2)not for a lack of trying 3) theories can be challenged, new proofs can be found Also “history” is a broad term. I would say a true scientific method didn’t mature until roughly the 19th century.
michaelpb 5y ago
> Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. Were they really though? I'm pretty sure there were plenty of things, especially things deemed to be "Intellectual Property violating", which were strictly banned on all these platforms far before 2010. One example is that Google has been removing search results for as long as I can remember. In other words, what was in your perspective "free and open" was very restrictive and politically pro-corporate from my perspective --- hardly an "objective stance" but instead a very political stance on what was permitted and what was forbidden.
- porknubbins 5y ago
  Ok Youtube for example has had a longstanding policy of removing videos using music clips without the rights (I assume proactively, not just in response to DMA notices). This is essentially an automatic mechanism, possibly overly aggressive, to stay within the law- find unlicensed music and silence the video. But like stopping me from infringing on a Metallica song is clearly categorically different from actually censoring a video about Coronavirus that doesn’t comform to some standard or is accused of spreading misinformation.
  - michaelpb 5y ago
    I brought up copyright as just one example, these platforms have many reasons (not always given) for deleting stuff, ranging from political content or activism to copyright. Most ToS's are quite arbitrary. People have been talking about this for a long time as well -- "Chilling Effects" turns 20 this year! At the risk of being a bit unkind it seems like it's mostly just conservatives who were "living under a rock" until now, and now suddenly have loads of opinions on it.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  I don’t think he was talking about search results. Rather other Google products like Drive. People used to share Hollywood films on Drive, for example.
  - 5y ago
ferdowsi 5y ago
To you it's a golden age, to others this is a period where the internet was thoroughly weaponized by misinformation agents to undermine democracy and civil societies around the world.
- throwaways885 5y ago
  But isn't the flip side of all this censorship a reduced ability for people to tell bullshit from reality? Why is information intelligence not taught in schools? Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant. There will always be a group of nutters who believe in flat earth, that vaccines cause autism, etc... Trying to cut that off at the source just throws these people into underground cults. A more scalable, sustainable solution is to 1) teach people to do their research - properly, as in, don't go on Facebook and join "Flat Earth Society Boston" to find The Truth 2) teach people it's okay to change their minds - part of this spreading cultism is that political opinions are now core identities 3) teach people to tolerate opposing viewpoints, even the silly ones - point and laugh, but don't try to cancel and destroy their lives Another thing - every time a tweet or document is censored, the replies are generally cut off as well. How can people learn to distinct true and false if they don't get to see examples of people being wrong and corrected.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    > Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant. No: much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to vaccines (i.e. education on how to spot deception, knowledge of what scams are currently going on). Enough people trying to deceive you, and eventually someone will succeed.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    How is the education system today going to help people who went to school in the 1970s? Conversely, what should we teach children today about the information threats of the 2050s?
    - 5y ago
bserge 5y ago
Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0. But I agree, platforms should be neutral. And people should still strive to control as much of their online properties as possible. Not just give it to Amazon and Google.
- eigen 5y ago
  > Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0. Eternal September was 1993. maybe this golden age of the internet where everyone was civil and educated and almost nothing was subject to censorship didn't really exist. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
zuminator 5y ago
Host absolutely everything? Instructions on creating explosives, chemical and biological weapons? Some future doomsday weapon? Would you say everything should be available up to and including methods for any unbalanced individual to single-handedly kill thousands or millions? How about your personal details, ID, address, employer, medical history, surfing, shopping habits? Would you even be ok with hackernews piercing the veil of your "throwaways885" username and publishing it?
- dahfizz 5y ago
  Platforms are not publishers. The publisher of these things should face legal action (including the removal of their content). It's not for the platform to pick and choose.
  - mahogany 5y ago
    Can you define "platform" in this context? Is this a legal term? It's interesting to see this dichotomy between platforms and publishers in these types of threads. I assume it stems from a reading of Section 230 somehow, but the word "platform" never appears in that text.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      Strictly speaking, "platform" is an umbrella term, and people are actually distinguishing between publisher and non-publisher.
- throwaways885 5y ago
  What I'm suggesting is that neither I or large corporations are capable of making that distinction. Nor the government for that matter.
  - nobody_at_all 5y ago
    Corporations only make that distinction on their property. These big tech companies do not have the power to silence anyone. Just like you can ban people you don't like from yours.
katbyte 5y ago
There is always a line and content that is illegal and the question will always be where that line is drawn.
- nybble41 5y ago
  A straightforward reading of the 1st Amendment indicates that there can be no such thing as illegal content under US law, including whatever you are right now considering proposing as an exception. An act involving speech may be illegal; if you make a credible threat of imminent, irreversible harm others are free to take you at your word and defend themselves—the justification here is the harm which is reasonably expected to follow, not the content of your speech. If you lie to someone to obtain their property under false pretenses, knowing that the lie precludes any "meeting of the minds" and thus renders the contract invalid such that the property still belongs to them, then you are committing theft. Your punishment derives from the act of taking property which did not belong to you, not the fact that you lied in the process. And of course what you say may be used as evidence against you without the speech itself being illegal. There are some more problematic areas where the Constitution itself is inconsistent. Copyright should not exist, for one; the core concept is utterly incompatible with freedom of speech. The Supreme Court even recognized this at one point—it's why we have the concept of "fair use" in the first place—but "fair use" is a poor compromise which does not fully negate the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have one clause saying that Congress has the power (but not the obligation) to do something which would infringe on the freedom of speech, and another clause later passed as an amendment saying "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech", the obvious reconciliation of these clauses is that Congress is barred from exercising that enumerated power because it would violate the later amendment. The Court tried to strike a balance instead… but it still amounts of Congress passing a law which abridges the freedom of speech, despite the limitations imposed by the Court.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    There was one other notable exception to free speech that undermines your point: obscenity is not, or has not been, considered speech under the terms of the free speech amendment. So, at least historically, there is some precedent for considering that some forms of human expression can be censored on their own merits. I should note that I am anti-censorship and consider such laws absurd, but my point is that we can't rely on readings of the constitution to self-evidently protect us from such things.
yibg 5y ago
I think this is one of those things that sounds nice on the surface but isn't really tenable in reality. Should they only host or also surface "everything"? Is deranking something censoring? What about not promoting something? If the idea is every thing is given equal weight, then things pretty quickly becomes a cesspool.
michaelmrose 5y ago
If I host a document for a certified notadoctor telling you that you should treat your children's autism by feeding them bleach which will certainly constitute abusing all of them and perhaps killing some do you think online marketplaces of ideas should ignore the fact that half the population is dumber than dirt and the dead kids and keep serving up poison?
- reedjosh 5y ago
  > fact that half the population is dumber than dirt I think you're going a little far there, and the fact that you're using this to justify censorship is pretty ugly.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    The case I gave is not in any way hypothetical there were many popular actual self published ebooks on amazon instructing you to abuse and possibly kill your kids with bleach to cure their autism. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoting-dangerous-bleach-cures-for-autism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoti... I'm not going too far I'm speaking empirically. Almost 1/4 of the population has an IQ less than 90 and is empirically challenged and a substantial portion of the remainder including those with reasonable or even high IQ are completely dysfunctional because regardless of how functional a brain they were born with they have basically ruined it by training it only to consume and create trash. One has only to talk to a large enough number of your fellow humans to realize half of them are in fact dumber than dirt. If there weren't literature about bleaching your childs insides to cure their autism or other insanity of the same grade would find no takers. If you find the number of bleach swillers insufficient consider thatnearly 40% of us in America believe that a genie created the earth less than 10k years ago. Overwhelmingly this is because they do not possess the intellectual aptitude to dismiss this theory. If their brains were highly functioning they would do so despite conditioning. Plenty of people will live 70-100 years and pass away in their hospital bed without ever ever having turned their brain into the on position. On the flip side others aggressively question the reality they are given but because they lack the inherent intelligence or have spent their entire intellectual life consuming the equivalent of junk food they are utterly incapable of discerning the difference between insane fantasy and truth.
slg 5y ago
>Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. Within the law of which country? Should copyrighted content be blocked in the US? What about in the Netherlands? Should Holocaust denying content be blocked in Germany? What about in the US? Should anti-CCP content be allowed in China? What about outside China? If you want to do the bare minimum according to the law, you are going to need a different implementation for every country. And even then people in countries with more lax laws are going to think you are acting unethically by censoring content in more restrictive countries and vice versa. EDIT: I have no idea why a comment that amounts to "different countries have different laws" is being downvoted.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  If you want to operate within a country you should follow the laws there. If the laws are immoral, you shouldn't operate there, or you should accept them and make money without being moral. That choice is up to the company. It's why google building AIs for china should be controversial. I'm not sure why this is a revelation.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. It was in the early part of the 2010's that Google, Twitter and others started censoring Islamic content in the name of antiterrorism and stopping the spread of extremism on their platforms.
koonsolo 5y ago
You clearly don't have kids that consume content on the internet.
ithinkso 5y ago
This is what I think people often miss in those discussions. There is an assumption that everything shared/'hosted' online is someone's opinion and thus should be allowed to be shared. This was never a case on the internet, don't trust what you read online. What should be regulated is what can be advertised, because most what you read is indistinguishable from an ad. Smoothies cure cancer - an ad or someone believe some antivax type bullshit? What if it's an ad to vote for a particular party because the other will do unbelievable bad things? Fanatic or serious opinion? Should you allow those kind of post on your platform? In my opinion you should just because it is the only way to make sure that your platform is not taken seriously and will prompt people to read something a bit more serious. It will stir controversies on twitter but who in IRL seriously considers an opinion of a twitter person? Edit: I went for a smoke I thought about it a bit more, take a look at voat vs reddit. Voat was created as a response to censorship on reddit and look at the cesspool of a place it is. Companies do not censor content because they have a moral stand or a political agenda, they moderate the content because otherwise it will turn into a shit you wouldn't believe (HN does it to). There is much more trolls on the internet responding to everything they can than legitimate people trying to have a discussion. New Eternal September started with social media and those not hardened by the internet before have a hard time to just dismiss what they read as 'a troll'
ixtli 5y ago
“Within the law” undermines your point. It takes the issue and just shifts it to another location on the map. It resolved nothing. We need to collectively grow up and acknowledge that not all disagreements can coexist and solve them.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  In America it shifts it to the US constitution, which provides a more principled approach to speech than the biases of tech companies. Is it a perfect solution? No. But it is closer to it than the present situation.
diego 5y ago
The law where? That is part of the problem. Every piece of content would need to have hundreds of flags, one for each jurisdiction in which the content could be viewed. That may not be enough for some countries given how easy it is to fake your origin address. It's solvable but not an easy problem.
pasca1 5y ago
It seems like consumers can't agree on why they are upset with these companies. I don't even think we can agree that a private company shouldn't be making decisions about what information should be allowed or removed.
oceanplexian 5y ago
+1 I have never been “outraged” by something posted on the Internet. Disgusted, disappointed or shocked, sure. But in no case did I think the hosting company was somehow responsible for it.
laumars 5y ago
> Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. So I’d rather let individual companies decide where they draw the line and if that happens to be not where you’d agree, then you can go support an alternate, if this there are many, who draws the line elsewhere. And for those who don’t want a private entity owning the infrastructure, there is always solutions like IPFS.
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  > The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. True, but I currently trust the line drawn by the law orders of magnitude more than I trust the one drawn by a bunch of faceless reactionaries at a handful of megacorps. Also, theoretically, I can participate in changing the law when it's either insufficient or overbearing. I have zero say in the corporate policies of the day.
  - silentsea90 5y ago
    So user generated fake news is ok, and so is foreign propaganda influencing elections? The law always lags behind what might defame a company(FB is the most recent example), hence the company ends up being proactive. Edit: I don't have strong opinions - just sharing a rational argument for being proactive.
    - brandonmenc 5y ago
      No, they're not "ok", but I personally believe that outright censorship is worse. ymmv.
      - silentsea90 5y ago
        It is a hard problem. The Govt pontificates about big tech issues without putting in the effort of making laws. Big tech is forced to anticipate what might defame them or be used by the Govt as ammo to garner public sympathy. It is a delicate balancing act between censorship and freedom. Zuck tried to put the onus on the Govt to define right and wrong, true and false, but to no avail. It is hard to please everybody unfortunately.
ai_ja_nai 5y ago
> Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. Self harm, terrorism, revenge porn, fabricated news. Just to name a few. Internet is very different from what we experienced in the 90s. The ingress barrier guaranteed good content (or at least entertaining content). Now the barrier to content submission has been lowered so much that really anything makes on the Web and this is not good. There are reasons, after all, for having locks on entrance doors, right? I am quite happy that Google "got the message" from regulators that misinformation is a real danger and we should apply zero tolerance to web polluters.
swayvil 5y ago
I say allow even CP. Take the whole system of control right out of the equation. Make the service 100% free, like sunshine, warming saint and sinner alike. Then, after we have that working, and we want to remove the CP, find another way. Do it on the client side or whatever.
IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago
Yeah. I think there is very little I see that should be censored beyond holocaust denial. Maybe CP. Oh... it's only you that gets a "...but for the stuff I believe is harmful" in there?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jb_s 5y ago
>Within the law Within the law from which jurisdiction? :-)
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
In 2006/07 they bought YouTube and Doubleclick. That is the inflection point on the evil meter.
xwolfi 5y ago
Very little beyond CP seriously. Why do you think the sufferinf of an abused child is somehow the only horror we should censor. Religious domination, violent intimidation, subtle suggestive manipulation, outright marketing lies, even government propaganda should all be censored to some extent to just be within the law These plarforms must be editors and yes it means less trash / second being published.
concordDance 5y ago
> To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. And, just to make the point of how hard it is to get consensus here, I'll disagree with you about the CP under some conditions. I think others will too. For example some would say that voluntarily made CP (e.g. 17 year old's nude pics) should be uncensored, others might just include an exception for simulated images, still others would say allow everything as long as there's a very low likelihood of victim or victim's connections stumbling across it and no money is changing hands.

landryraccoon 5y ago

That's your choice. Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars? I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. That doesn't mean other companies can't host that data, simply that I don't want any of my dollars to go to those companies. If the vast majority of consumers also don't want to give money to companies that host that content, that's the hosting company's problem. The free market is speaking. Nobody is making it illegal for that data to be hosted, but nobody is obliged to pay for it to be hosted. So it seems to me that things are working as intended.

teh_infallible 5y ago
I think the whole concept of “voting with your dollars” is flawed. Google will always have more votes than you.
- derek_codes 5y ago
  What? So because someone or something has more money than us, we should just say screw it and buy products we are morally against? That makes no sense.
- nybble41 5y ago
  The analogy to voting to flawed in that actual voting is much too powerful, because it involves politics and the use of force. When you "vote" with your dollars your choices are to either support something or ignore it and spend your money somewhere else. The amount of support you can provide is limited by the economic surplus you've created, and no matter how much money you amass you can't just shut down something you dislike as long as other people continue to support it. Voting in the political sense lacks these safeguards: a majority (or vocal minority) can subsidize their pet projects with the opposition's resources, or prohibit harmless activities merely because they find them distasteful.
jlawson 5y ago
No, because just a handful of companies control the entire ecosystem. There is no alternative, you cannot escape their influence and you cannot function without interacting with them. If Google and Apple ban you from their products and platforms, and Visa shuts down your payment processing, there is nowhere to go. You're done. This and much more has happened many times. You're making the "just build your own internet bro" argument.
- mason55 5y ago
  But I think we need to examine both sides of this. When the American concept of free speech was coined, it was valuable because you could go stand in a government owned square and communicate your message for free. It was a good balance between not forcing private companies to accept speech but still allowing the speech to happen. Online we don't have the concept of a government run square, and so your speech can be totally stifled by private companies. But the difference is that when you're standing in the town square shouting nonsense, your reach is constrained, your ability to reproduce your speech is low (you have to just stand there and keep shouting) and everyone knows who you are. Damaging speech just can't be that damaging. Online is totally different. I think the argument of "Google can't censor you, only the government can" is not great because there's no gov't equivalent of the town square. But I don't think the answer is just "make Google accept all speech" or "create a gov't equivalent of the town square" is necessarily the answer either. I think we should be starting from first principles and understand what free speech is trying to accomplish and come up with a framework that helps us accomplish it.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    The history of printing things for wide scale distribution well predates the first amendment and it is silly to pretend otherwise.
    - inlined 5y ago
      But the history of forcing those publications to host your opinion is unprecedented
acituan 5y ago
We’re not talking about individual choice but an inherent ir/rationality in censorious behavior. Vast majority of the consumers probably make pragmatic rather than idealistic consumption choices. Eg when you source a new iPhone, you source certain unethical labor practices. When you make use of the US dollar, you make use of some amount of atrocities that built its international purchasing power (eg any of the petrodollar wars). I bet those rarely bother even the most so-called “idealistic” consumers because a) it is a hard calculus to compute b) it is impossible to live when every “impure” thing is removed from use. The difference with public content hosting is being able to twist arms to make them take down stuff and conform to an image of virtuousness which we narcissistically and psuedo-religiously identify with. It is not about the real damage the contents pose, it is our intolerance to being seen as a “person who can use such sites”. The threat is to our confirmation bias, in this case the confirmation of an idea that there is a clear right and wrong and we are definitely right.
- landryraccoon 5y ago
  I'm confused. I don't see the problem. What's the difference between the image of virtue and just virtue? If the majority of people believe that images of virtuousness are what they want, then that's just what they want. People aren't computing the outcome, their ethics are based on appearances and always have been. The internet doesn't change that fact. Whether it was in the middle ages or the post-industrial period or today, virtue has always been performative. So I don't really see what you think your argument demonstrates.
  - acituan 5y ago
    > What's the difference between the image of virtue and just virtue? What’s the difference between a real car and a perfect cardboard replica? One has functionality and interiority. The other is just exteriority. In the King Midas story, he wants everything to be mindlessly golden and thus turns them into unusable shiny crap. He got the golden exterior alright, with none of the real goldenness, goodness they would afford him.
    - 5y ago
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
There is no free market in big tech.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  There's little free market for the consumers in tech in general. The barriers to entry are extreme - between inherent complexity of the products, enormous capital investments required, and scale-related benefits (economies of scale, network effects), few can afford to start a real competitor. You can't just make a new Facebook or a new smartphone or even a new coffee machine - not without making a faustian bargain with investors, a deal which is usually the root problem behind why technology sucks. Consumers only get to choose out of what's available, and in this market, it's hard for an entrepreneurial consumer to make some things available when the market isn't providing them.
theandrewbailey 5y ago
> I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. Isn't that a sign of a moral panic? Back in the 90s, my parents didn't want to patronize companies that signed deals with pornographers. Even though I was only 10, that sounded ridiculous. Good luck finding any large company that doesn't.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  If people wont do business with people who do business with pornographers what right do the pornographers or porn aficionados have to object. If it would render it more clear it wouldn't matter if the subject were avocados. It's not a moral judgement on the worthiness of porn its about consumer choice in aggregate.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  Can you explain this? Are you referring to tech only? Maybe I’m way too oblivious but of the large companies I pay money to I find it hard to imagine that most are signing deals with pornographers.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  Did the local utilities (water, electric) refuse them to pornographers, and did you parents boycott those?
- jjeaff 5y ago
  Just how many modern companies do you think are actively dealing in pornography?
- landryraccoon 5y ago
  I don’t see what’s changed. Youtube doesn’t host pornographic content either. The Apple App store doesn’t allow adult content of any kind. If you’re saying maybe Youtube and the Apple store should grow up a little and allow adult content I’m sympathetic but the horse has long left the barn on that one.
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
13of40 5y ago
The impact of that is asymmetrical, though. A company that's making 1% profit (thinking a rural TV station here, not necessarily Google) can't afford to lose 10% of it's viewers, so they dial down their programming to the least objectionable possible. That's how we get in a situation where most people want to watch Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones but what they get are Brady Bunch reruns.
madmax96 5y ago
That is the point of the free market. But deplatforming certain kinds of offensive content is regressive. For instance, in the not-so-distant past many Americans found interracial marriage morally abhorrent. Wikipedia says only 5% of Americans thought interracial marriage should be legal in the 1950s. In today’s environment, that leads to deplatforming those who would’ve supported marriage equality. This is not something we would desire. People are full of prejudices. I’m sure our grandchildren will look back in horror at ours. Let’s not deplatform them for that.
- obedm 5y ago
  I always think I can draw the line in the sand as a very rational and relatively well read person. But then I remember that the best thinkers the world has ever seen (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, ad nauseum) were never able to look beyond their noses to see the human suffering of others. Aka, they were perfectly happy to have a society run by slaves, to ignore the plight of the poor and sick, etc.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    That may be true of Plato, Aristotle, etc. But one thing I have learned from history is that there is almost always a contingent of people that do find terrible things like slavery abhorrent and were even outspoken about it. But if you are an elite, and benefit greatly from something, you are probably much less likely to be outspoken against it.
    - obedm 5y ago
      I've never heard of any ancient philosopher being abhorrent about slavery and the like and I've read that there weren't any. Could you point to some readings if you're aware of it? I'd love to know
      - MatteoFrigo 5y ago
        Seneca had a somewhat more humane attitude towards slavery. See e.g. https://figsinwinter.medium.com/seneca-to-lucilius-47-on-slaves-and-human-beings-f13602f62b46 https://figsinwinter.medium.com/seneca-to-lucilius-47-on-sla...
ineptech 5y ago
> Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars? Can you pinpoint the moral difference between "Google should be allowed to refuse to host content that they dislike" and "Restaurants should be allowed to refuse to serve ethnicities that they dislike"? It is a feature of free markets that consumers choose where to spend their money; but it is also a feature of liberal societies that the law precludes the majority from driving out an unpopular minority by refusing to do business with them.

gcanyon 5y ago

This is reasonable as an ideal, but could be harmful in practice. A significant percentage of the U.S. population believes inarguably wrong and demonstrably dangerous things at this point. It is possible that the only effective way to fix that is corporate censorship. That wouldn’t make me happy, but I’m not going to agree with letting a crazy person steer the Titanic into an iceberg just because it’s their right to do so.

lenkite 5y ago
Until they commit crimes and are formally charged and prosecuted in a court of law, they can believe anything they like.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
Well, remove their voting rights then if you think that they are too stupid. Why should I be the one who suffers?
native_samples 5y ago
Ah, but how do you know you're not the one believing crazy wrong and dangerous things? All those terms are highly relative and if your answer is argument by authority, well ...
- prox 5y ago
  Because there are an awful lot of knowledge domains where there is consensus among experts, and one can verify their own knowledge along those lines.
  - wtetzner 5y ago
    The consensus of experts has been wrong many times throughout history.
    - prox 5y ago
      1)depends on the domain 2)not for a lack of trying 3) theories can be challenged, new proofs can be found Also “history” is a broad term. I would say a true scientific method didn’t mature until roughly the 19th century.

michaelpb 5y ago

> Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. Were they really though? I'm pretty sure there were plenty of things, especially things deemed to be "Intellectual Property violating", which were strictly banned on all these platforms far before 2010. One example is that Google has been removing search results for as long as I can remember. In other words, what was in your perspective "free and open" was very restrictive and politically pro-corporate from my perspective --- hardly an "objective stance" but instead a very political stance on what was permitted and what was forbidden.

porknubbins 5y ago
Ok Youtube for example has had a longstanding policy of removing videos using music clips without the rights (I assume proactively, not just in response to DMA notices). This is essentially an automatic mechanism, possibly overly aggressive, to stay within the law- find unlicensed music and silence the video. But like stopping me from infringing on a Metallica song is clearly categorically different from actually censoring a video about Coronavirus that doesn’t comform to some standard or is accused of spreading misinformation.
- michaelpb 5y ago
  I brought up copyright as just one example, these platforms have many reasons (not always given) for deleting stuff, ranging from political content or activism to copyright. Most ToS's are quite arbitrary. People have been talking about this for a long time as well -- "Chilling Effects" turns 20 this year! At the risk of being a bit unkind it seems like it's mostly just conservatives who were "living under a rock" until now, and now suddenly have loads of opinions on it.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
I don’t think he was talking about search results. Rather other Google products like Drive. People used to share Hollywood films on Drive, for example.
- 5y ago

ferdowsi 5y ago

To you it's a golden age, to others this is a period where the internet was thoroughly weaponized by misinformation agents to undermine democracy and civil societies around the world.

throwaways885 5y ago
But isn't the flip side of all this censorship a reduced ability for people to tell bullshit from reality? Why is information intelligence not taught in schools? Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant. There will always be a group of nutters who believe in flat earth, that vaccines cause autism, etc... Trying to cut that off at the source just throws these people into underground cults. A more scalable, sustainable solution is to 1) teach people to do their research - properly, as in, don't go on Facebook and join "Flat Earth Society Boston" to find The Truth 2) teach people it's okay to change their minds - part of this spreading cultism is that political opinions are now core identities 3) teach people to tolerate opposing viewpoints, even the silly ones - point and laugh, but don't try to cancel and destroy their lives Another thing - every time a tweet or document is censored, the replies are generally cut off as well. How can people learn to distinct true and false if they don't get to see examples of people being wrong and corrected.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  > Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant. No: much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to vaccines (i.e. education on how to spot deception, knowledge of what scams are currently going on). Enough people trying to deceive you, and eventually someone will succeed.
- pjc50 5y ago
  How is the education system today going to help people who went to school in the 1970s? Conversely, what should we teach children today about the information threats of the 2050s?
  - 5y ago

bserge 5y ago

Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0. But I agree, platforms should be neutral. And people should still strive to control as much of their online properties as possible. Not just give it to Amazon and Google.

eigen 5y ago
> Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0. Eternal September was 1993. maybe this golden age of the internet where everyone was civil and educated and almost nothing was subject to censorship didn't really exist. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

zuminator 5y ago

Host absolutely everything? Instructions on creating explosives, chemical and biological weapons? Some future doomsday weapon? Would you say everything should be available up to and including methods for any unbalanced individual to single-handedly kill thousands or millions? How about your personal details, ID, address, employer, medical history, surfing, shopping habits? Would you even be ok with hackernews piercing the veil of your "throwaways885" username and publishing it?

dahfizz 5y ago
Platforms are not publishers. The publisher of these things should face legal action (including the removal of their content). It's not for the platform to pick and choose.
- mahogany 5y ago
  Can you define "platform" in this context? Is this a legal term? It's interesting to see this dichotomy between platforms and publishers in these types of threads. I assume it stems from a reading of Section 230 somehow, but the word "platform" never appears in that text.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Strictly speaking, "platform" is an umbrella term, and people are actually distinguishing between publisher and non-publisher.
throwaways885 5y ago
What I'm suggesting is that neither I or large corporations are capable of making that distinction. Nor the government for that matter.
- nobody_at_all 5y ago
  Corporations only make that distinction on their property. These big tech companies do not have the power to silence anyone. Just like you can ban people you don't like from yours.

katbyte 5y ago

There is always a line and content that is illegal and the question will always be where that line is drawn.

nybble41 5y ago
A straightforward reading of the 1st Amendment indicates that there can be no such thing as illegal content under US law, including whatever you are right now considering proposing as an exception. An act involving speech may be illegal; if you make a credible threat of imminent, irreversible harm others are free to take you at your word and defend themselves—the justification here is the harm which is reasonably expected to follow, not the content of your speech. If you lie to someone to obtain their property under false pretenses, knowing that the lie precludes any "meeting of the minds" and thus renders the contract invalid such that the property still belongs to them, then you are committing theft. Your punishment derives from the act of taking property which did not belong to you, not the fact that you lied in the process. And of course what you say may be used as evidence against you without the speech itself being illegal. There are some more problematic areas where the Constitution itself is inconsistent. Copyright should not exist, for one; the core concept is utterly incompatible with freedom of speech. The Supreme Court even recognized this at one point—it's why we have the concept of "fair use" in the first place—but "fair use" is a poor compromise which does not fully negate the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have one clause saying that Congress has the power (but not the obligation) to do something which would infringe on the freedom of speech, and another clause later passed as an amendment saying "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech", the obvious reconciliation of these clauses is that Congress is barred from exercising that enumerated power because it would violate the later amendment. The Court tried to strike a balance instead… but it still amounts of Congress passing a law which abridges the freedom of speech, despite the limitations imposed by the Court.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  There was one other notable exception to free speech that undermines your point: obscenity is not, or has not been, considered speech under the terms of the free speech amendment. So, at least historically, there is some precedent for considering that some forms of human expression can be censored on their own merits. I should note that I am anti-censorship and consider such laws absurd, but my point is that we can't rely on readings of the constitution to self-evidently protect us from such things.

yibg 5y ago

I think this is one of those things that sounds nice on the surface but isn't really tenable in reality. Should they only host or also surface "everything"? Is deranking something censoring? What about not promoting something? If the idea is every thing is given equal weight, then things pretty quickly becomes a cesspool.

michaelmrose 5y ago

If I host a document for a certified notadoctor telling you that you should treat your children's autism by feeding them bleach which will certainly constitute abusing all of them and perhaps killing some do you think online marketplaces of ideas should ignore the fact that half the population is dumber than dirt and the dead kids and keep serving up poison?

reedjosh 5y ago
> fact that half the population is dumber than dirt I think you're going a little far there, and the fact that you're using this to justify censorship is pretty ugly.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  The case I gave is not in any way hypothetical there were many popular actual self published ebooks on amazon instructing you to abuse and possibly kill your kids with bleach to cure their autism. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoting-dangerous-bleach-cures-for-autism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoti... I'm not going too far I'm speaking empirically. Almost 1/4 of the population has an IQ less than 90 and is empirically challenged and a substantial portion of the remainder including those with reasonable or even high IQ are completely dysfunctional because regardless of how functional a brain they were born with they have basically ruined it by training it only to consume and create trash. One has only to talk to a large enough number of your fellow humans to realize half of them are in fact dumber than dirt. If there weren't literature about bleaching your childs insides to cure their autism or other insanity of the same grade would find no takers. If you find the number of bleach swillers insufficient consider thatnearly 40% of us in America believe that a genie created the earth less than 10k years ago. Overwhelmingly this is because they do not possess the intellectual aptitude to dismiss this theory. If their brains were highly functioning they would do so despite conditioning. Plenty of people will live 70-100 years and pass away in their hospital bed without ever ever having turned their brain into the on position. On the flip side others aggressively question the reality they are given but because they lack the inherent intelligence or have spent their entire intellectual life consuming the equivalent of junk food they are utterly incapable of discerning the difference between insane fantasy and truth.

slg 5y ago

>Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. Within the law of which country? Should copyrighted content be blocked in the US? What about in the Netherlands? Should Holocaust denying content be blocked in Germany? What about in the US? Should anti-CCP content be allowed in China? What about outside China? If you want to do the bare minimum according to the law, you are going to need a different implementation for every country. And even then people in countries with more lax laws are going to think you are acting unethically by censoring content in more restrictive countries and vice versa. EDIT: I have no idea why a comment that amounts to "different countries have different laws" is being downvoted.

LegitShady 5y ago
If you want to operate within a country you should follow the laws there. If the laws are immoral, you shouldn't operate there, or you should accept them and make money without being moral. That choice is up to the company. It's why google building AIs for china should be controversial. I'm not sure why this is a revelation.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open. It was in the early part of the 2010's that Google, Twitter and others started censoring Islamic content in the name of antiterrorism and stopping the spread of extremism on their platforms.

koonsolo 5y ago

You clearly don't have kids that consume content on the internet.

ithinkso 5y ago

This is what I think people often miss in those discussions. There is an assumption that everything shared/'hosted' online is someone's opinion and thus should be allowed to be shared. This was never a case on the internet, don't trust what you read online. What should be regulated is what can be advertised, because most what you read is indistinguishable from an ad. Smoothies cure cancer - an ad or someone believe some antivax type bullshit? What if it's an ad to vote for a particular party because the other will do unbelievable bad things? Fanatic or serious opinion? Should you allow those kind of post on your platform? In my opinion you should just because it is the only way to make sure that your platform is not taken seriously and will prompt people to read something a bit more serious. It will stir controversies on twitter but who in IRL seriously considers an opinion of a twitter person? Edit: I went for a smoke I thought about it a bit more, take a look at voat vs reddit. Voat was created as a response to censorship on reddit and look at the cesspool of a place it is. Companies do not censor content because they have a moral stand or a political agenda, they moderate the content because otherwise it will turn into a shit you wouldn't believe (HN does it to). There is much more trolls on the internet responding to everything they can than legitimate people trying to have a discussion. New Eternal September started with social media and those not hardened by the internet before have a hard time to just dismiss what they read as 'a troll'

ixtli 5y ago

“Within the law” undermines your point. It takes the issue and just shifts it to another location on the map. It resolved nothing. We need to collectively grow up and acknowledge that not all disagreements can coexist and solve them.

throwawaysea 5y ago
In America it shifts it to the US constitution, which provides a more principled approach to speech than the biases of tech companies. Is it a perfect solution? No. But it is closer to it than the present situation.

diego 5y ago

The law where? That is part of the problem. Every piece of content would need to have hundreds of flags, one for each jurisdiction in which the content could be viewed. That may not be enough for some countries given how easy it is to fake your origin address. It's solvable but not an easy problem.

pasca1 5y ago

It seems like consumers can't agree on why they are upset with these companies. I don't even think we can agree that a private company shouldn't be making decisions about what information should be allowed or removed.

oceanplexian 5y ago

+1 I have never been “outraged” by something posted on the Internet. Disgusted, disappointed or shocked, sure. But in no case did I think the hosting company was somehow responsible for it.

laumars 5y ago

> Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. So I’d rather let individual companies decide where they draw the line and if that happens to be not where you’d agree, then you can go support an alternate, if this there are many, who draws the line elsewhere. And for those who don’t want a private entity owning the infrastructure, there is always solutions like IPFS.

brandonmenc 5y ago
> The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. True, but I currently trust the line drawn by the law orders of magnitude more than I trust the one drawn by a bunch of faceless reactionaries at a handful of megacorps. Also, theoretically, I can participate in changing the law when it's either insufficient or overbearing. I have zero say in the corporate policies of the day.
- silentsea90 5y ago
  So user generated fake news is ok, and so is foreign propaganda influencing elections? The law always lags behind what might defame a company(FB is the most recent example), hence the company ends up being proactive. Edit: I don't have strong opinions - just sharing a rational argument for being proactive.
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    No, they're not "ok", but I personally believe that outright censorship is worse. ymmv.
    - silentsea90 5y ago
      It is a hard problem. The Govt pontificates about big tech issues without putting in the effort of making laws. Big tech is forced to anticipate what might defame them or be used by the Govt as ammo to garner public sympathy. It is a delicate balancing act between censorship and freedom. Zuck tried to put the onus on the Govt to define right and wrong, true and false, but to no avail. It is hard to please everybody unfortunately.

ai_ja_nai 5y ago

> Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. Self harm, terrorism, revenge porn, fabricated news. Just to name a few. Internet is very different from what we experienced in the 90s. The ingress barrier guaranteed good content (or at least entertaining content). Now the barrier to content submission has been lowered so much that really anything makes on the Web and this is not good. There are reasons, after all, for having locks on entrance doors, right? I am quite happy that Google "got the message" from regulators that misinformation is a real danger and we should apply zero tolerance to web polluters.

swayvil 5y ago

I say allow even CP. Take the whole system of control right out of the equation. Make the service 100% free, like sunshine, warming saint and sinner alike. Then, after we have that working, and we want to remove the CP, find another way. Do it on the client side or whatever.

IfOnlyYouKnew 5y ago

Yeah. I think there is very little I see that should be censored beyond holocaust denial. Maybe CP. Oh... it's only you that gets a "...but for the stuff I believe is harmful" in there?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jb_s 5y ago

>Within the law Within the law from which jurisdiction? :-)

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

In 2006/07 they bought YouTube and Doubleclick. That is the inflection point on the evil meter.

xwolfi 5y ago

Very little beyond CP seriously. Why do you think the sufferinf of an abused child is somehow the only horror we should censor. Religious domination, violent intimidation, subtle suggestive manipulation, outright marketing lies, even government propaganda should all be censored to some extent to just be within the law These plarforms must be editors and yes it means less trash / second being published.

concordDance 5y ago

> To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP. And, just to make the point of how hard it is to get consensus here, I'll disagree with you about the CP under some conditions. I think others will too. For example some would say that voluntarily made CP (e.g. 17 year old's nude pics) should be uncensored, others might just include an exception for simulated images, still others would say allow everything as long as there's a very low likelihood of victim or victim's connections stumbling across it and no money is changing hands.