38 ms·

Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

• SpywareThrow 5y ago
  This is a ridiculous take. You will get censored no matter how much you try to “talk” about it. You’re dealing with people who will nod, say uh huh, and carry on doing what they were doing regardless of what’s written. Nothing has really been accomplished in the last decade. It’s a one way ticket to surveillance and censorship.
  • 0des 5y ago
    "Crises precipitate change" - Deltron 3030
    • leopaacc 5y ago
      "never let a crisis go to waste" - someone
      • ModernMech 5y ago
        That was Churchill.
    • defterGoose 5y ago
      "I wanna devise a virus; to bring dire straits to our environment" Groans in 2021
    • bitwize 5y ago
      "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas lying around." --Milton Friedman
  • UncensoredNews 5y ago
    There is a way to circumvent censorship. Read your news using RSS feeds. Shameless Plug: I do that and [recommend the best articles](https://UnCensoredNews.us https://UnCensoredNews.us)
• croes 5y ago
  I think that's why Cyberpunk as a fictional genre is dead, it's too real.
  • Ajay-p 5y ago
    I've been waiting for @cstross to finish the Halting State series but at last update, he appeared to opine that fiction was getting too close to reality. Thus he has declined to finish the series. I felt this was a bit of a cop out at the time. The Halting State series had us thinking about these issues, which I think is better than not thinking, writing, and debating them. If reality is catching up to fiction, then write about reality, don't be afraid of it.
• daenz 5y ago
  Take what you support and imagine it used against you in the worst possible ways. Do you still support it? If yes, then it is worth supporting. If it's not, then maybe you're only supporting it because of who it currently helps or harms. This exercise also works with things that you don't support.
  • betterunix2 5y ago
    ...which is exactly how I concluded that the censorship we see online is basically necessary. The worst possible ways that online speech can be used against me include being murdered by a lone-wolf terrorist who received instruction online. The worst that can happen to me from censorship being imposed is that I will not be allowed to say certain things online or challenge those in power, or possibly that I will be excluded from these social networks entirely because the people in power do not like what I said -- which is certainly bad, but not quite as bad as being dead. The unfortunate truth is that terrorist organizations use mainstream social networking sites to recruit and radicalize. We are sitting here talking about how power has been concentrated and how everyone is subject to censorship -- as if we did not just spend a decade watching ISIS and violent white nationalist groups amplify their messages by evading the controls that existed in legacy media outlets. "This is why we can't have nice things" is the expression that comes to mind...
    • AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
      You certainly must love the way things are going in Belarus then.
      • betterunix2 5y ago
        I prefer the way things are run in countries like France and Germany, where people understand the value of free speech in debating politics and spreading new ideas while also recognizing that some limits are necessary (e.g. limits on speech that promotes a resurgence of nazism).
        • 5y ago
• LatteLazy 5y ago
  There are really 2 options here: 1. Live with the first amendment at section 230 as. That means things stay mostly the same. Big tech will continue to censor too many of the things I like and too few of the things I don't like. And we wait for the pre-internet generation to die off and be replaced so society can progress. 2. Restrict the 1st and force fact checking, fairness, neutrality, etc. This would get us back to a functional media/societal/democratic state a lot faster. But it would require pretty radical change. Also, the biggest losers wouldn't be big tech. They would be Fox news and similar orgs. I don't see any other option here. I don't see that "regulating" (wtf that means, different things to different people for sure) Facebook but not Fox is productive or fair or possible even really. Personally, I don't trust the current system to do anything other than beat tech companies with a stick for no reason but that they exist and don't pay enough in "lobbying". I don't see Fox or similar, much bigger propaganda/censorship orgs being touched. Certainly not on a bipartisan basis (and that's what's needed to do more than sneeze in Washington). So here we are, and I am glad the right and left and (stupidly) fighting each other... Thanks for reading, you may now downvote these inconvenient truths...
  • version_five 5y ago
    I didn't downvote but I read twice and I don't understand what you're saying. Maybe you could try and rephrase to make your point clearer?
    • LatteLazy 5y ago
      * Problems with fake news, censorship etc are much bigger outside of big tech than inside (media monopolies and propoganda like fox news for a start). * so if you actually care about those issues (rather than just hating big tech) you need to fix things beyond big tech * that means reform of the 1st amendment * I suspect that no one actually wants that, they just don't like Facebook etc but they're used to Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan Is that any better :)
      • version_five 5y ago
        Yes I understand now thanks!
• rektide 5y ago
  I tend to agree with this article: we all should be worried about being dependent on having only a few core systems where speech happens, especially when network effect & switching costs are very very high. I believe platforms have the right to moderate themselves as they see fit. They get that freedom, and we're better for letting private systems regulate themselves. Or, (as mentioned) as Twitter is floating, creating an “app store for moderation”, making moderation an interoperable layer rather than integrated. And I agree with where Cory eventually brings the discussion to: what makes everything all feel so impossible is that switching costs are astronomical. If we leave the one network our friend is on we lose all digital connection with that friend, lose the view we'd get of them interacting with others. Competitive Compatibility is needed, to let us allow private companies to create their own rules, but to not keep each of us restrained & restricted within a handful of supersized networks.
  • dane-pgp 5y ago
    > “app store for moderation” One amusing possibility about this approach is that if Twitter implemented it and governments decided that they didn't like Twitter's default censorship regime, Twitter could say "That's fine, just provide your own censorship system and write a law forcing that system onto all users in your country." I suspect at least some governments would be reluctant to incur the financial and political costs of maintaining their own (inevitably imperfect and controversial) censorship regime, and would then find it harder to act at arms length and say "Twitter has to do more" as they do currently.
  • wizzwizz4 5y ago
    > If we leave the one network our friend is on we lose all digital connection with that friend, lose the view we'd get of them interacting with others. Ever since I started using the Fediverse, I haven't had this problem. Sure, most of my friends aren't there, but I'm happy to IM or email them instead.
    • rektide 5y ago
      yeah i actually like seeing my friends talking with each other & being able to join in the various conversations they're having. if you're fine just leaving the online social circles your friends are in good for you. but i hope you can see how very very very very very short an answer & how rude is comes across to most people. and i'm sorry your friends are so boring.
• mindslight 5y ago
  The long term threat of big tech censorship is that it is priming governments with an expectation that all online communication can (and therefore should) be policed - the exact opposite of the decentralized permissionless Internet dream. The longer they maintain bearable levels of censorship, the longer governments have to cozy up to the idea and expect to apply it to communications technology that lacks the centralization vulnerability. So ultimately, the faster Big Tech implodes and goes the way of Digg, the better. We should cheer when they stay well ahead of what governments want to censor - it makes it clear they are more like TV channels than letting them claim to be manifestations of "the Internet".
• drstewart 5y ago
  It was certainly weird to see all the "they're private businesses, they can do what they want!" takes from the internet when Trump and Parler were banned, after the same people have been yelling for years that these same corporations have too much power over the public narrative.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > It was certainly weird to see all the "they're private businesses, they can do what they want!" takes from the internet when Trump and Parler were banned, after the same people have been yelling for years that these same corporations have too much power over the public narrative. Why? Its not inconsistent to argue, as many on the left have, both before and after the right-wingers started whining because they lost their excessively favorable treatment from Twitter, Facebook, et al.: (1) Free speech means that private actors should have the right to control the messages their resources are used to relay. (2) A subset of the tech companies right-wingers complain about to justify trying to impose state-backed mandates to carry right-wing content on internet providers generally are overly dominant monopolies and have excessive power over public communication because of that, which is a problem that is should be dealt with by dealing with the monopolies, not curtailing the freedom of speech of private actors.
    • yokem55 5y ago
      This - the solution isn't to compell overly large websites or web hosts to carry speech that they don't want. It's to use antitrust law to break them up so more smaller websites can viably carry whatever they want. Now there should also be a clear demarcation of what internet services need to be a common carrier vs not. Let's say bandwidth, colocation, ip address allocation, and domain registration services were required to take all comers. Then if you want to have your gay commie gun club forum, you could get a domain, buy your own hardware, put it up in a colo facility, get bandwidth and ip addresses, and then have an uncensored presence on the net.
    • read_if_gay_ 5y ago
      > excessive power over public communication [...] should be dealt with by dealing with the monopolies, not curtailing the freedom of speech of private actors. That sounds like a nice idea. However, I'm seeing it for the first time. While (1) and (2) aren't inconsistent, typically only (1) is brought up. Take your average thread about how, say, Google is now beginning to censor X thing. It makes little sense to defend big tech censorship with point (1), leaving out (2), if you actually hold both opinions (1) and (2). The latter kind of implies that you agree big tech censorship is a problem. The former in isolation points toward the opposite. Therefore, I don't think most people who argue (1) actually believe in (2) as well.
• jacob2484 5y ago
  The people on the "right side of history" are usually fighting for freedom and liberty, not censorship and re-education camps
  • britch 5y ago
    Winners usually frame their fights as ones for freedom and liberty, and emphasize their enemy's use of censorship and re-education camps.
    • jacob2484 5y ago
      Something is either being censored or it's not. Regardless of the issue, I'll side with the side that is not censoring information.
      • jayrice257 5y ago
        That's not the point he's making, any winner can historically write what they want so you don't really get to choose from a history of facts.
      • ashtonkem 5y ago
        A quick perusal through history will show that conflicts where one side is censorious and the other is not has basically never happened. Usually the winning side sweeps their misdeeds under the rug afterwards. See: US behavior towards communists and left wing groups during the Cold War, or censorship during WW1 and WW2. The whole "fire in a crowded theater" trope comes from the unanimous Supreme Court decision upholding the conviction of someone peacefully distributing fliers protesting the draft in WW1[0]. Funny how that one usually doesn't make it into the history books. 0 - Schenck vs. United States. Thankfully no longer good law.
        • khawkins 5y ago
          Most people are openly taught about the misdeeds of the McCarthy era in schools and in public discussions. This wasn't swept under the rug, most people agree that it happened and wasn't a good thing.
• Nursie 5y ago
  >First of all, the internet’s “marketplace of ideas” is severely lopsided at the platform level The marketplace of ideas itself has been show to be a bust in recent years, IMHO. Better ideas, better models of truth and reality don't win out. People have not shown themselves interested in intellectual debate or argument. We do not see the 'best' ideas rise to the top. And before anyone asks who I am to judge the best ideas, I'll answer - nobody, but I can see that factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created. Often at the root of these is a profit motive. Is censorship the best way to deal with it? Probably not. But we do need to recognise this as a problem as well as getting het up about giant internet platforms deplatforming people.
  • pankajdoharey 5y ago
    Its less a "Marketplace of Ideas" and more a "church or private establishment" on the network. Even HN isnt spot on sometime bad ideas do rise up when they it appeals to peoples emotions more than sensibilities.
    • cratermoon 5y ago
      Social media (and the internet as a whole) are shaped by and promote the values of those who create it. They allow certain interactions and not others. (to what extent are the creators the leaders of the social media companies, vs. the users?) https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/519/440 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/51...
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    > factually incorrect, scientifically illiterate, conspiratorial, harmful crank ideas gain legs in the online world we've created I don't think this is unique to the online world. It's just how humans are. We are drawn to sensational, scandalous stories for some combination of entertainment and self-righteous outrage/virtue signaling to the others in our tribe.
    • 5y ago
• jsnell 5y ago
  This all sounds very nice, but there's a bit of sleight of hand here since the article goes out of its way to avoid details. That way everyone reads into exactly what they want, and it's totally non-obvious whether this is actually a workable proposal or not. But what's the concrete proposal here? How would things actually work? Will the services be forced to accept whatever unmoderated feed of filth the linked to service sends their way? If not, how is this supposed to fix the moderation problem? How are you supposed to link together applications with totally different data, interaction, and identity models? Obviously you couldn't link e.g. say Discord to Instagram and have the interactions between the systems make any sense. Are we just going to have a predefined ontology of possible social networkign apps, populated with the currently existing models, and define an API for all of then? When and how does that ontology get redefined? Or define a single lowest common denominator covering everything? What happens with features that don't fit into the models? They're entirely forbidden? They need to go through a multi-year public review bureacracy? Who exactly will be forced to interoperate, and who gets a free pass?
  • Nursie 5y ago
    > Will the services be forced to accept whatever unmoderated feed of filth the linked to service sends their way? I was kinda wondering that. If a user gets banned, and moves off-platform to continue the behaviour there, but is somehow magically still linked to everyone they were linked with before... has anything really changed? Will facebook be forced to show its users the same nastiness it just booted off, because of the interop necessities?
    • PontifexMinimus 5y ago
      > Will facebook be forced to show its users the same nastiness it just booted off, because of the interop necessities? Facebook should be forced to show me the feeds I choose to subscribe to. I'm perfectly capable of deciding for myself whether I find something nasty, and I find the idea of Zuckerberg as an arbiter of morality both absurd and dystopian.
      • Nursie 5y ago
• s9w 5y ago
  No. Only the right gets censored, so the left reinforces this whenever they can
• renewiltord 5y ago
  Nah, I’m actually totally on board with big tech censorship so long as the government doesn’t act as an authority to fuse censorship across all platforms and instead acts to ensure that cartelized blackballing doesn’t happen I.e. a ban from Facebook shouldn’t cause an auto-ban from Twitter. Otherwise, I don’t care. Kick me off your platform. It’s your house and you have a right to not share it with me.
  • chroem- 5y ago
    > so long as the government doesn’t act as an authority to fuse censorship across all platforms They literally discussed how they're doing this last week during a white house press conference.
    • caseysoftware 5y ago
      When you consider things like Venmo facilitate social connections and interactions, this spills into payments pretty easily too. And remember when Google launched Google+? They referred to email as the largest social network of all.. which is why they just started people's G+ connections with their most frequently emailed/emailers.
    • knownjorbist 5y ago
      Did they?
      • chroem- 5y ago
        Yes. > We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff > https://www.newsweek.com/biden-administrations-admission-theyre-flagging-content-facebook-sparks-furor-1610257 https://www.newsweek.com/biden-administrations-admission-the... Psaki also discussed how they're building blacklists of people so that if you get banned on one platform, you also get banned on all of the other platforms.
        • knownjorbist 5y ago
• PontifexMinimus 5y ago
  Mandating interoperability, with ActivityPub and similar protocols, would help. In the long term I'd like to see a future where it's a normal thing for people to roll their own social media platforms, by putting a Raspberry Pi on their local network, downloading and configuring some open-source software, and the local nodes all talk to each other and doing so gives someone the same level of functionality that they today have with a Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Tiktok/etc account.
  • ashtonkem 5y ago
    That’ll never happen for the same reason why basically nobody runs their own online services today. Most people strongly favor the convenience of existing SaaS services, which is why dropbox beats out all the self hosted alternatives by orders of magnitude.
    • roody15 5y ago
      meh … dropbox really?
      • dvdkon 5y ago
        Yeah, file storage/syncing is probably the best example of successful self-hosting for moderately "techy" people, with commercial NASes usually offering much better and cheaper services than cloud storage for home/office usage.
    • PontifexMinimus 5y ago
      > Most people strongly favor the convenience of existing SaaS services If it was more convenient to roll your own, then I contend that many people would, and many more would have accounts on friends' servers. The difficulty shouldn't be any higher than the cost of a Pi server and spending an hour setting it up -- all of which is perfectly possible to achieve technocally.
      • ashtonkem 5y ago
• teslaberry 5y ago
  worried? I am embracing our new overlords. if you don't love your overlords, than leave, go to china with less freedom or africa with more freedom. amerqua fuqu yes!
• okareaman 5y ago
  thought experiment: If I have a megaphone rental company and I become aware that one of my clients is using it to walk through neighborhoods annoying people by loudly proclaiming Covid is a Democratic Party hoax and Republicans are fools for not acknowledging Donald Trump lost, can I refuse to rent my megaphone to that person and not be guilty of censorship? I own all the megaphones in town and no one else rents them.
• politician 5y ago
  It would be workable to designate these social platforms as public spaces, removing liability for speech entirely off of the proprietors and onto the courts if we also implemented mandatory licensing for use of these networks. You can’t drive without a license and identification. It’s not dystopian to suggest that, as a society, we’re at a point where we need to insist on public places on the Internet and personal accountability for speech. We can’t abdicate our responsibility to regulate this space to tech companies and pretend that billions of people interacting is somehow magically beyond the point of governments.
  • wmf 5y ago
    More "real names" policies won't do anything about misinformation. People are already mostly accountable for their speech, but since misinformation is legal that accountability doesn't do anything.
  • pjc50 5y ago
    Alex Jones was able to post disinformation on the radio under his own name for years before he finally overstepped into defaming the Sandy Hook parents.
  • MrStonedOne 5y ago
    >You can’t drive without a license and identification. It’s not dystopian to suggest that, as a society, we’re at a point where we need to insist on public places on the Internet and personal accountability for speech. ay yo you got a license for that speech? ya, no, it is dystopian to suggestion people should have to have a license to speak. And you will never sell me that speaking on the internet and speaking in the public are different enough to justify it. social media sites have become the new town square. General public speech has moved from afk to on the internet, you can't just ignore this because its inconvenient to your view point. The same protections we have for speech in an town square should exist for speech on the virtual town square. ie: only moderated by the courts under protection of the 1st amendment. I'm not going to accept less.
    • politician 5y ago
• devwastaken 5y ago
  I'm not concerned. If I ran a platform serving out qanon BS I'd ban and log their details. Terrorists don't get protections from a private company, nor should they. People don't understand just how insane these groups of people have become. Without FBI interference these terrorist groups would have murdered multiple state governors and carried out plenty of bombings. I'm not going to "be neutral" to such people. 1. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_pl..., "The Wolverine Watchmen group had been recruiting members on Facebook from November 2019 until June 2020, when Facebook began purging all boogaloo-related material." 2. AWS datacenter attack, https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/amazon/aws-data-center-staff-high-alert-after-company-pulled-plug-parler https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/amazon/aws-data-center-s..., "Management has warned Amazon data center staff to be on the lookout for any suspicious activity following a comment on Parler that suggested “someone with explosives training” could “pay a visit to some AWS data centers,"" 3. Sovreign citizen movement + violent plots, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/sovereign-citizens-movement https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideo... 4. Jan 6th : Pauline Bauer - https://youtu.be/rvgwR4kfQVs https://youtu.be/rvgwR4kfQVs, Participated in the insurrection because "Democrats are behind pedo rings" - this is fabricated propaganda perpetuated on the net that we can how see has actual, real world harm. 5. 8Chan, https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/, hosted many form of illigal, harmful and predatory content, namely directions/links to CP, animal abuse, Revenge porn, coordinated harassment of groups and people for the purposes of suiciding other people. This is still there on their new site, but it is now a heavy hotbed of conspiracy nuts that believe they're the victims. Plenty more that I can't remember off the top of my head.
  • remarkEon 5y ago
    >Plenty more that I can't remember off the top of my head. You should familiarize yourself with the rest of post-War 20th century history in the United States, then. Far, far more deadly and dangerous "conspiracy theories" existed before the internet and caused actual deaths of sitting politicians. It's the Presentism of all of this that is making people forget how pernicious it is, letting these powerful organizations have this authority to ban "misinformation".
• vsareto 5y ago
  >The promise of the ACCESS Act is an internet where if you don’t like a big platform’s moderation policies, if you think they’re too tolerant of abusers or too quick to kick someone off for getting too passionate during a debate, you can leave, and still stay connected to the people who matter to you. Use any number of other communication methods or services that brilliant humans have invented to allow us all to talk to each other within seconds? How have we reached such technical ineptitude that we can no longer consider other options other than big tech platforms when communicating? As if folks weren't stringing wires up across countries 100+ years before so we could send beeps at each other. Now we're going to write laws so your crazy relatives can talk about their conspiratorial alternate reality because losing their friends list is such a painful burden? I think I'd swallow a bullet before being asked to work on any technical features for this act. I know that's absolutely going to suck and I can't think of a worse place to end up after dealing with the difficulty of learning CompSci and programming. This is going to be a waste of everyone's time and resources for no good social benefit. Literally go fix a bridge with this time and money and it'll do more good for the world.
  • mousepilot 5y ago
    Still there are folks that cannot deal with anything outside of Facebook, ie., cannot run a regular browser because they simply don't know how. We have CLEARLY reached such technical ineptitude.
    • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      Ineptitude might be the correct description assuming that one should have a certain level of tech savvy to participate online but should that really be the case? Apple not long ago ran a "what's a computer?" ad because participation in the use of computer powered tools no longer requires an understanding of how those tools work under the hood. While that might be disappointing to us geeks, for most people it's a good thing. I'm glad I can drive my truck to the National Forest without knowing anything about the correct ignition timing. Should an understanding of web browsers be a requirement to use the Facebook app?
• FranchuFranchu 5y ago
  "Whoa, it's the guy in that one xkcd comic!"
  • MrStonedOne 5y ago
    I love Randell but he was never right on that issue. The United States Constitution doesn't own the concept of free speech. The concept existed before the constitution was written, it will exist after the usa falls. While he is correct, in that somebody arguing a social network site censoring them has validated the first amendment, is fucking stupid. He is not correct in arguing that all references to free speech refer to the 1st amendment, and the fact that the 1st amendment only applies to government censorship doesn't restrain the broad concept of free speech to only applying to government censorship.
• Layke1123 5y ago
  You can't censor the left. You might be able to silence them for a time, but reality has a liberal bias and the same ideas will always resurface. It's ironic that they are called the conservative ones really since their schemes perpetually change to suit themselves.
• AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  Those who's looking to censor the information for the sake of the greater good: USA. Little to no censorship (yet). Vaccination rate: 55% Russia. Mass media is controlled by the state. Vaccination rate: 20% Hmmmm...
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• cratermoon 5y ago
  Probably a good place for reposting this: https://publicseminar.org/essays/why-we-should-outlaw-oppressive-speech-acts/ https://publicseminar.org/essays/why-we-should-outlaw-oppres...
  • cornel_io 5y ago
    That's basically just saying that racism and hate speech are super ultra duper bad and we should outlaw things like that, as well as vastly expand what we consider beyond the pale so that it captures what are fairly mainstream opinions. I (as well as many others) disagree, and in fact I think that the people that argue for hate speech laws are far more dangerous than the tiny handful of actual white supremacists out there who are just losing their battle slowly over time.
    • cratermoon 5y ago
      Did you know that in the Aeropagetica, John Milton's 1644 pamphlet that is a landmark in the history of free speech, Milton literally said it was OK to censor Catholicism and superstition? [1] Freedom of speech has always been subject to limitations, exceptions, and special pleadings. There is no absolute liberty, there is only freedom to the extent that society is indifferent to, or can at least tolerate. "even opinions lose their immunity when the circumstances in which they are expressed are such as to constitute their expression a positive instigation to some mischievous act" [2] [1] "Yet if all cannot be of one mind—as who looks they should be?—this doubtless is more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian, that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled. I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which, as it extirpates all religions and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate" https://www.gutenberg.org/files/608/608-h/608-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/608/608-h/608-h.htm [2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1919/11/the-basic-problem-of-democracy/569095/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1919/11/the-bas...
• Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Not that Cory is wrong but his words would hold more weight if boingboing hadn't been engaging in the behavior he decries for over a decade. Memory holing people who they no longer feel "are wonderful" and removing vowels from posts they don't agree with are just two examples of the type of activity they've long engaged in. These aren't cases of off-topic discussion, threats, or other attempts at derailing discussions, they're personality, romantic, or ideological disagreements that aren't allowed to exist.
  • Torwald 5y ago
    Can you share links to works from people that you deem memory holed by EFF, please?
• notatelloshill 5y ago
  im just not worried at all ... this problem is only a problem for people that think social networks matter. They dont. These connections are vapor, their importance is only granted by the person that believes it to be. To think that social media is important is to think being famous is important. Its the same mindset that makes people feel more or less confident based on how many likes they have. Step away from the social media. Do something active in the real world. Learn a craft. Make a connection with someone in your area. Please like this comment.
• LoveLeadAcid 5y ago
  Just do what smart people have been doing for years - stop using big tech. Stop using Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM, Microsoft. Buy a used computer and install a Free OS and just check out of the entire big tech ecosystem. Otherwise you get what you deserve. And let’s all disabuse ourselves of the incorrect notion that it’s big tech alone which is ordering censorship. It’s our own governments, who use the many secret laws and intelligence agency relationships (all of big tech is basically In-Q-Tel) to get what they want. Make it difficult for them. Don’t play nice. Dissent. Stop using PRISM platforms.
  • smoldesu 5y ago
    This right here is it, for the most part. I see a lot of people who lament how terrible the takeover of "big tech" is, but they still use Facebook on a regular basis and don't go out of their way to seek alternatives. It's like complaining that Kraft has taken over your local supermarket aisle while you're buying 10 boxes of name-brand mac and cheese.
    • 11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
      Well, that Mac & Cheese is free cuz you're giving them your phone number so they can call you and sell you a gym membership.
    • shrimpx 5y ago
      Not really. There's a gradient of entrenchment. Your example doesn't work at all if we're talking about deeply-entrenched/natural-monopoly products like electricity or internet access instead of a trivially-switchable product like a brand of mac & cheese or ranch dressing. The question is where does Facebook fall on that gradient? It's certainly not on the "product on the supermarket shelf" end. It's closer to the middle somewhere. I gave up Facebook in 2013 and more or less lost any semblance of an ongoing connection to a dozen childhood friends from my home country. Many people aren't willing to give up that type of thing. This isn't whatsoever like swappable supermarket products.
  • blfr 5y ago
    I use Linux, discuss political ideas on private, members-only forums, and share memes over Signal. This is an excellent setup... if you want to have conversations with your fellow computer janitors. This is no way to connect to other people. And these people might also have interesting ideas, ideas I might want to hear before some bot at Facebooks deems them against "community standards" or whatever they call their censorship that is totally not censorship.
• bitwize 5y ago
  Yes, censorship is bad, but which is worse: admitting a little bit of censorship, or Nazis? Because uh, right now, we have Nazis. In Germany, if you express Nazi views you will be arrested and thrown in prison. Germany is, according to many metrics, freer than the USA. Perhaps because of its laws that put Nazis in prison.
  • remarkEon 5y ago
    >Because uh, right now, we have Nazis. We do not, in fact, have Nazis. Allow me to re-phrase: Yes, censorship is bad, but which is worse: admitting a little bit of censorship, or Islamic Terrorists? Because uh, right now, we have Islamic Terrorists. At least one was real in the last couple decades.
    • bitwize 5y ago
      It is an ironclad fact that more Americans have been killed by right-wing domestic terrorists than by Islamic terrorists since 9/11.
      • naniwaduni 5y ago
        "since 9/11" is one hell of a cutoff cf. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/31/terrorists-vs-chairs-an-outlier-story/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/31/terrorists-vs-chairs-a...
        • LimaBearz 5y ago
          Just to point out… 9/11 is close to 20 years ago now.. society has marched forward quite a bit since then. While that date as a cutoff point is fairly arbitrary there has been a substantial and alarming rise to extremist right violence I’m the last 10 years or so and that can’t just be swept under a rug
          • deleted 5y ago
            [deleted]
• candiddevmike 5y ago
  A little off topic, but wouldn't an easier fix for some of the addiction and misinformation bubbles be to legislate, by law, that all "feed apps" always show things newest to oldest and require users to consciously click, everytime, to show "top" or "hot". This would help a lot to fix the "zombie feed scrolling" in my opinion and prevent engagement algorithms from only showing polarizing content.
• Pxtl 5y ago
  The reason that centrists support private censorship now is very simple: We are now facing disinformation campaigns that have apocalyptic consequences, and normal legal channels are quite ineffective at battling them. "Well of course, it's not the government's job to decide between true and false, nor to enforce it!" you say. Bullshit, I say. Slander is illegal. False advertising is illegal. Fraud is illegal. Defamation is illegal. Perjury is illegal. Filing a false report is illegal. There are a plethora of torts and laws where you will get sued or jailed for lying about something important (like a court matter) and in those cases the truth is a defense! That means a court decides what is true and what is false. So we've admitted that we're willing to abridge free speech to protect truth. That's now established. But we're only willing to do it for cases where somebody can show clear damages, and where there's a clear target to sue. A diffuse, widespread misinformation movement against a concept and not a person? Like climate change, or vaccines, or covid, or Judaism at large? Those aren't protected at all. And why not? Because there isn't a shareholder of climate change who can show that your misinformation has unjustly damaged his share price? So given this legal vacuum, is it any wonder that the reality-based community has embraced private censorship? Nobody loves this solution, but the alternative is letting one third of the population doom the other two thirds by obstructing the kind of actions we need to survive.
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    > There are a plethora of torts and laws where you will get sued or jailed for lying about something important (like a court matter) and in those cases the truth is a defense! That means a court decides what is true and what is false. Yes. Courts do that. They decide on what the facts are, and on how the law applies to those facts. I don't have a problem with a court doing that. I have a problem with Facebook doing that. Even more I have a problem with some government agency telling Facebook to do that (unless the government agency is a court, and they have a finding of fact on that particular issue). And, "the reality-based community"? Was that the community that agreed that masks wouldn't help? Or was it the exact same community a month later, that said that masks would help? I mean, it's good that they're trying to follow the evidence. But no, I won't let them censor, because they've been wrong before, and will be again.
  • 5y ago
• thirdreich 5y ago
  return to 1930-1945 germany it looks like?freedom of speech is such an important right and privilege, it needs to be saved, and so does democracy! let's not repeat the past
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• chiefalchemist 5y ago
  Censorship is a symptom. It is a means. The ends is control. "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" changed my understanding and view of not only Big Tech, but the broader political context as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capi...
• varelse 5y ago
  Enragement equals engagement. If that's the world you want, good news, that's the world we have now. And the magic of AI and recommender systems has disrupted that old and stupid model of if "it bleeds it leads" to get you outraged faster and with far less effort than it used to take in the old and stupid days. But that's not the world I want to live in personally and if it takes some imperfect even sometimes ham-fisted regulation to get us to a better place I'm willing to deal with that rather than embrace the status quo because it sucks and it's just getting worse as the tools to hack social media have been democratized at scale. Ideally I'd love to let the free marketplace of ideas work this out (and it eventually will and I am a huge believer in weakly efficient marketplaces), but unless I get a 1000 plus year lifespan, I only have so many years left in my lightcone so I side with being more proactive.
  • verdverm 5y ago
    Perhaps our generation must suffer during an evolutionarily difficult time so that we do not end up in 1984?
    • varelse 5y ago
      Perhaps our generation must rely less on ridiculous hyperbole whose only benefit is to drive engagement and instead consider more compromise solutions to situations like this?
      • verdverm 5y ago
        What is given up in the compromise?
  • toomanyducks 5y ago
    "The free marketplace of ideas" (and also classical liberalism) is hugely reliant on the idea of humans as rational agents (both the people selling and the people consuming). But when we're not, everything opens up to tons of propaganda (especially that from fascists who are more than willing to engage where leftists will reject premises). You can't have "enragement equals engagement" AND the "free" marketplace of ideas is good. The first is the natural consequence of the existence of the latter. If you take issue with the first, you should not accept the second either. As for what should replace that 'free' market, I honestly don't know. But deplatforming (not censoring, deplatforming) hate speech is a good place to start.
• Isamu 5y ago
  Does anyone remember the days when internet media companies didn’t want to censor anything? Because after all it costs more and puts them in a position where nobody is satisfied? And do you remember when they were called onto the carpet by repeated congressional committees for… Allowing copyright violations? Allowing terrorists’ messages? Allowing misinformation relating to elections? Allowing hate speech? Now censoring misinformation? Do you remember when you were incensed by the inaction of media companies and demanded action, and now are dismayed that they are acting?
  • SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    > Do you remember when you were incensed by the inaction of media companies Not even a little bit. Some of us have been ideologically consistent that censorship is not helpful.
• jmull 5y ago
  I don’t see what the argument is that the marketplace of ideas isn’t working. Facebook doesn’t prevent you from using Twitter, or Reddit or a small new network. All kinds of people can and do engage with multiple networks, big and small, at their own inclination. All of the platforms are accessed on the same internet using the same protocols and clients, and it’s trivial — completely trivial — to find alternate content or all kinds (at least in the US). People aren’t abandoning the big platforms in droves because they generally like those big platforms. (Probably almost nobody thinks they are great, but that’s not the standard. The standard is better than the alternatives.) As the article points out, the marketplace of ideas is leading Twitter to more flexible moderation mechanisms that let users choose their own level. Seems crazy to change the rules, force companies to break their business models, when the system is working fine. Doctorow (and others) may not like it, but many, many people like Facebook and Twitter a lot more than they dislike them. Protective regulation should come into play when the affected populace is not in any position to consent to (or decline) the situation. E.g., because alternatives aren’t available, or because the issue requires special expertise to understand, etc. But generally this doesn’t apply here. (I do think there needs to be recourse for people who are banned or otherwise lose access to something they’ve invested in.)
• bshanks 5y ago
  The proposed ACCESS Act discussed in the post appears to be at: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3849/text https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3849...
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• Jerry2 5y ago
  ACLU is still silent about the latest attack on free speech. They still haven't opposed the White House's plan to enforce speech. I've cancelled my monthly donations to them because of it. Please do the same if you give them money.
  • busymom0 5y ago
    ACLU has been down the tubes for a while now, especially when it comes to political cases. > ACLU Lawyer Cheers Suppression of a New Book https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-ongoing-death-of-free-speech https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-ongoing-death-of-free-s... > ACLU Again Cowardly Abstains From an Online Censorship Controversy https://greenwald.substack.com/p/aclu-again-cowardly-abstains-from https://greenwald.substack.com/p/aclu-again-cowardly-abstain...
  • pradn 5y ago
    I have never been comfortable with supporting the ACLU because of their "money is speech" stance. The political system of the US has become increasingly plutocratic, making it hard for popular policies to be enacted and make progress toward important issues like fighting poverty and climate change.
• SMAAART 5y ago
  Censorship is like Zeno's dichotomy paradox; today the people promoting Censorship as a solution are happy; give it a long enough timeline and the very same people promoting Censorship will be the ones being censored.
• jensensbutton 5y ago
  Article and linked proposal really just don't even attempt to tackle the privacy implications of all this. People don't like that WhatsApp knows your _metadata_, but we're supposed to be good with anyone being able to bring all the metadata of their entire social network to any random provider? How do you make such an argument in 2021, the year "privacy" went mainstream?
• busymom0 5y ago
  The censorship debate always reminds me of the 2000s after 9/11 where anyone who opposed going to war in multiple foreign countries which had nothing to do with 9/11 were labelled "terrorist sympathizers". Taking advantage of this, they also passed a mass spying bill - the Patriot Act. Stating "man cannot be a woman" or "men shouldn't compete in women's sports" is considered transphobic in current climate. Regardless of which side of the Palestine-Israel conflict you fall one, either or both sides can be censored by labelling it as "anti-semitic" or "islamaphobic". Speaking out against the Patriot Act and forever wars would be (and was) labelled "unpatriotic" and "terrorist sympathizer" and censored. Speaking out against healthy living would be labelled "fat phobic". Or the opposite could also happen. All the groups which speak out against fat shaming could also get censored because it's dangerous to public health. The government and big tech would start censoring you for advertising soft drinks/chips and other junk food. Since all religions oppose gay marriage, when super religious are in power, they would censor LGBT content. Pro-choice would get censored for religious reasons and Pro-life would be censored for racism/dangerous or other reasons. Just a few days ago there were 2 posts on HN: Rival weightlifter speaks out on transgender Hubbard's Olympic place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598383 The blackout Palestinians are facing on social media: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27645282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27645282 In the first case, my women friends are too afraid to speak up because they are afraid of being labelled a transphobic. 3 of my female friends have lost sports scholarships to biological men. In the second case, the reasoning provided is "Criticism of Israel is Anti-Semitism. Really.": https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/criticism-of-israel-is-anti-semitism-really/ https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/criticism-of-israel-is-anti-... Here is a partial historical list of scientific consensus "deniers" proven right which this sort of censorship will either silence by big tech or due to self-censorship: 1. Ignaz Semmelweis, who suggested that doctors should wash their hands, and who eliminated puerpal fever as a result, was fired, harassed, forced to move, had his career destroyed, and died in a mental institution at age 47. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_established_medical_opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with... 2. Alfred Wegener, the geophysicist who first proposed continental drift, the basis of plate tectonics, was berated for over 40 years by mainstream geologists who organized to oppose him in favour of a trans-oceanic land bridge. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener#Reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener#Reaction 3. Aristarchus of Samos, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, brilliant minds and leaders in their field all supported the heliocentric model. They were at some point either ignored, derided, vilified, or jailed for their beliefs. All this because they went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_over_heliocentrism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Controversy_ov... 4. J Harlen Bretz, the geologist who documented the catastrophic Missoula floods, was ridiculed and humiliated by uniformitarian "elders" for 30 years before his ideas were accepted. He first proposed that a giant flood raked Eastern Washington in prehistoric times, and who suffered ridicule and skepticism until decades of further research proved his thesis. All this because he went against consensus science. He was eventually awarded the Penrose Medal. https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/bretzs-flood-for-geologist-states-great-flood-is-a-story-of-ridicule-redemption/ https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/bretzs-floo... 5. Carl F. Gauss, discoverer of non-Euclidean geometry, self-censored his own work for 30 years for fear of ridicule, reprisal, and relegation. It did not become known until after his death. Similar published work was ridiculed. His personal diaries indicate that he had made several important mathematical discoveries years or decades before his contemporaries published them. Scottish-American mathematician and writer Eric Temple Bell said that if Gauss had published all of his discoveries in a timely manner, he would have advanced mathematics by fifty years All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss#Personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss#Personali... 6. Hans Alfven, a Nobel plasma physicist, showed that electric currents operate at large scales in the cosmos. His work was considered unorthodox and is still rejected despite providing answers to many of cosmology's problems. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfvén https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfvén 7. Georg Cantor, creator of set theory in mathematics, was so fiercely attacked that he suffered long bouts of depression. He was called a charlatan and a corrupter of youth and his work was referred to as utter nonsense. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Cantor 8. Kristian Birkeland, the man who explained the polar aurorae, had his views disputed and ridiculed as a fringe theory by mainstream scientists until fifty years after his death. He is thought by some to have committed suicide. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristian_Birkeland#Legacy 9. Gregor Mendel, founder of genetics, whose seminal paper was criticized by the scientific community, was ignored for over 35 years. Most of the leading scientists simply failed to understand his obscure and innovative work. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Initial_reception_of_Mendel's_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Initial_receptio... 10. Michael Servetus discovered pulmonary circulation. As his work was deemed to be heretical, the inquisitors confiscated his property, arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and burned him at the stake atop a pyre of his own books. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus#Imprisonment_and_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Servetus#Imprisonment_... 11. Amedeo Avogadro's atomic-molecular theory was ignored by the scientific community, as was future similar work. It was confirmed four years after his death, yet it took fully one hundred years for his theory to be accepted. All this because he went against consensus science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro#Response_to_the_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amedeo_Avogadro#Response_to_th...
• foxhop 5y ago
  I posted my public stance on this topic here: https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can.html https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
• busymom0 5y ago
  A lot of the discussion around censorship devolves to "it's a private company, they can do whatever". While this has already been proven to be a false idea based on the comments from the White House actively telling private companies which posts/users to take down, I would also like to share how things happen in China: "People in the U.S. seem able to recognize that China’s censorship of the internet is bad. They say: “It’s so authoritarian, tyrannical, terrible, a human rights violation.” Everyone sees that, but then when it happens to us, here, we say, “Oh, but it’s a private company doing it.” What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies. Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau chief for Beijing and Tokyo, wrote a book called Consent of the Network that lays all this out. She says, “This is one of the features of Chinese internet censorship and surveillance—that it's actually carried out primarily by private sector companies, by the tech platforms and services, not by the police. And that the companies that run China's internet services and platforms are acting as an extension of state power.” The people who make that argument don’t realize how close we are to the same model. There are two layers. Everyone’s familiar with “The Great Firewall of China,” where they’re blocking out foreign websites. Well, the US does that too. We just shut down Press TV, which is Iran’s PBS, for instance. We mimic that first layer as well, and now there’s also the second layer, internally, that involves private companies doing most of the censorship." https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-matt-orfalea https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-matt-orfalea
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > While this has already been proven to be a false idea based on the comments from the White House actively telling private companies which posts/users to take down No, it hasn't. A government office telling private actors what it cobsiders to be misinformation and would like not relayed is not state censorship as long as there is no compulsory process. A private party can certainly use “I trust the government, and they say X is wrong” as an input to their consideration of how to exercise their free speech without it being anything other than free speech. > What people don’t realize is the majority of censorship in China is being carried out by private companies. China has and uses compulsory process to ensure compliance with its desired censorship, though.
• Nevermark 5y ago
  Big tech censorship will not solved without addressing the other half of a problem with two sides. Without systems that promote quality, non-ideological, nuanced, original, tolerant dialogue we will keep running into the false dilemma of unmoderated cess pools or heavy handed moderation. If we are to avoid this dilemma we need systems that organically promote constructive, tolerant and inclusive communication, and original, nuanced, intelligent, non-ideological ideas, instead of the opposite. This cannot be done by organizations whose profit incentive is aligned with user attention instead of user satisfaction. Those organizations benefit from degraded communication until strong moderation is both continually demanded and decried. --- On a side note, I am so disappointed in the constant framing of ideas as right or left. It dumbs society down incredibly to view so much through the filter of two (often arbitrarily correlated, historically shifting) clusters of supposedly disjoint options. In the real world, communes work well sometimes, markets often work better at scale but not for everything, markets require "social solutions" like non-commercial criminal and civil justice systems, education and health could be explicitly tested and then managed as investments with a pay off of lower taxes (including for the rich) instead of as charities forced on the rich, etc. The Right/Left and associated ideologies are all self-defeating when believed in isolation and the nuances of their ragged edges, their limitations, and constructive combinations ignored.
  • prawn 5y ago
    I like your comment and think it could potentially approach the broader problem in a roundabout way, but it does feel like a separate thing. But ignoring that, I run a forum and so think a lot about ways of encouraging decent conversation. I think Reddit mostly does pretty well in that (in my experience) the junk is hidden and requires effort to read. Hacker News pushes it down the page, but it's trivial to scroll down and see who's in the naughty corner out of curiosity. I mostly read r/NBA and find the quality very decent. I'm sure there are trolls and racist rants and so on, but unless I expand comment branches, I don't see any of them. I find that the branches being pruned/hidden helps manage how much time I spend on a discussion too. On HN, I often feel like I want to read or skim every comment in a discussion which is rarely a great use of time.
    • deleted 5y ago
• threesmegiste 5y ago
  When the trump accounts were shut down, the political stance and attitude silenced the criticism. it's too late now. The social media accounts of the president of the usa have been closed. The account of a man who received half the votes from the USA has been closed. then the majority could not say it was wrong. now it's too late to talk and complain
• anonytrary 5y ago
  I wish this attitude was more prevalent. The most dangerous thing we can do is turn a non-partisan issue into a partisan one. As soon as it becomes about right vs. left, you have an army of people on Twitter, etc. who are ready to mindlessly shill a viewpoint, not because they know anything about it, but because it aligns with their political identity.
• cable2600 5y ago
  Actually the people getting banned and censored did Gab and a few others that were cut off from Paypal, Visa, Patreon and others. They have to go somewhere, and are not wanted on Big Tech social networks. They have been radicalized as a result. Believing conspiracy theories and alt-right groups.
  • originalvichy 5y ago
    My experience with peeking into Gab was being greeted by a suprisingly large amount of neo-nazi posts dominating the site. From my experience you don’t really need to push neo-nazis into conspiracy theories – their ideology is already a one big conspiracy theory.
• OhWellLol 5y ago
  This title is clickbait trash. It is obvious the right wing is the core of global dehumanism. Therefore, and perfect righteous resistance against such subhuman filth filled with simplistic hatred will be rewarded in the essentialist framework of Western humanism. Kill all white people to be on the right side of history.
• joelbondurant 5y ago
  Communists long for tyranny.
• morpheos137 5y ago
  I am starting to think tech is bad period. If we could have avoide the industrial revolution it would have been mych better for humanity and for the planet.
• re-al 5y ago
  No one has 'the truth', it's just not that sort of thing. Everyone has opinions. Some opinions are lies. Transparency is the way to deal with the lies. But if you're the one lying and have your hands on the levers of power, censorship is a great tool.
• timwaagh 5y ago
  Honestly aren't there bigger problems in this world? These days it's all privacy and tech. What about governments going out of their way to deny people a roof over one's head? Now I know that isn't necessarily eff's problem but it's a bigger problem than Facebook censoring stuff that doesn't align with their idea of political correctness. Don't get me wrong I didn't like it when FB censored one of my countries greatest traditions, but it's just one of those annoyances that you just need to accept.
• Cyberthal 5y ago
  Imagine if Mao and Sun Yat Sen were duking it out, and nerds blamed Facebook for the resulting social polarization. Yeah man, and the printing press too. Those Protestant Reformation wars were no joke!
• ji0 5y ago
  Our “right and left” are social norms built on censorship; Main Street is the most active censor of new ideas out there; save the Constitution and Capitalism! Naturally leaving alternatives untouched. We’re censored. We self censor, and socially censor our neighbors and friends to maintain so-called “polite society.” I’m not worried about big tech; that’s just a euphemism for “this cohort of humans.” It’s still humans under the hood. I’m worried about you all. Edit: HN is effectively propped up by big tech investors and here it is; downvoting of commentary on a thread about fearing censorship by technologists. Censoring each other has become the norm not the exception thanks to technologists.
• taylodl 5y ago
  What you should be worried about is people claiming to have the right to use your private property and when violating your terms of service complain about "censorship." It's no different than inviting someone to your home for dinner whereupon they go on a racist/political rant to the point where you ask them to leave, and then they complain loudly about censorship. It's not censorship.
• LBarret 5y ago
  Also what about laws and governments ? This is a very american perspective IMHO to miss this part of the picture. Some stuff should be regulated. Especially post of FB/Twitter/ect that are actually provably false and whose diffusion are nothing but a carefully crafted op from a foreign country. you could be concerned about over-regulation, but currently we are at the opposite side of the spectrum. Asking FB/Twitter - or any company - to do the right thing and go against its own interest is simply naive.