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The 'elites' control the narrative through propaganda censors like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Anything that doesn't conform to their predetermined agenda ge

The 'elites' control the narrative through propaganda censors like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Anything that doesn't conform to their predetermined agenda gets discredited, the author smeared, then eventually banned from posting. These are legitimate 1st amendment issues that need to be defended or what little freedom we have left will be boiled away like baby frogs.

bastardoperator 5y ago
Pot meet kettle. You're spreading propaganda about propaganda. I need concrete evidence of who these 'elites' are. Names, dates, actionable steps taken by individuals, and proof of the agenda. If you can't provide these basic data points, from this vantage point you're no different then the folks you're complaining about. This has nothing to do with 1A. Businesses have the right to refuse service if you're being too loud in their establishment. Sorry, not sorry.
- Thetawaves 5y ago
  As if Facebook doesn't have an entire division doing this exact thing. We can't name specific names, because there are no specific names. These are institutions, and their orders flow down from the top. Your comment is 100% disingenuous.
- mariavillosa 5y ago
  >This has nothing to do with 1A. Businesses have the right to refuse service if you're being too loud in their establishment. Sorry, not sorry. If the purpose of 1a is to foster a society where speech is democratic, then it does, because corporations have largely replaced governments as the primary arbiters of information. So philosophically, the idea behind it is very relevant. The kind of power that governments abused, leading to 1a, is in some ways analogous to corporate power today. Whether that analogy is valid is the debate, right? I'm not from the US, but I wonder - just like how liberalism radically reimagined governance and the role of the commons in their relationship to the state, I wonder how a revolution this century could radically reimagine the digital commons. What will seem like obvious, basic digital rights, 100 years from now, that are completely unimaginable to my digitally medieval brain, like a preliberal medieval peasant?
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    It’s pretty easy to opt out of corporate dystopia without being jailed or murdered. People love to brag about how they quit social media. This sounds like people want to have the benefits of these platforms without accepting the trade offs.
    - mariavillosa 5y ago
      >It’s pretty easy to opt out of corporate dystopia >People love to brag about how they quit social media. Social media is the tip of the dystopic iceberg
      - edmundsauto 5y ago
        Sure, but it’s a different dystopia than Gibson or Dick our Paul Verhoucen (sp?) predicted. They reflect common, primal human fears and are not indicative of insight. Just as my fear of heights does not provide wisdom against constructing/operating tall things - whether it be buildings, pyramids, or airplane flights.
  - bastardoperator 5y ago
    That's not the purpose of the 1A. If you read 1A it's fairly basic. Congress shall make no law... 1A protects you from the government. If we dive deeper into the civil rights act no business serving the public can discriminate because of a customer's national origin, sex, religion, color, or race Unless someone can prove people are being removed from platforms for reasons above companies are well within their rights to refuse service.
    - mariavillosa 5y ago
      > That's not the purpose of the 1A. If you read 1A it's fairly basic. >Congress... Right, at the time of writing, that would have been perceived as the gravest threat to free expression. But I don't think that's still the case. > Unless someone can prove people are being removed from platforms for reasons above companies are well within their rights to refuse service. Agreed completely, I'm not making a legal claim. My claim attempts to stand on the moral philosophy behind these laws.
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  The irony is, your argument is the Appeal to Ignorance fallacy.
- Svettie 5y ago
  No, this isn't a trial. It's OK to raise ideas up for others' consideration. The absence of obvious evidence doesn't mean the thing itself isn't happening. There is also a big difference between one person's voice on a platform, and a decision-maker of the platform who is creating policy/process for filtering those voices.
  - _lqaf 5y ago
    Bitching about 'the elites' is garbage. It is a contentless description unless you identify who you're bitching about, primarily used as a way to get others to agree with you by substituting their own conception of 'elitists'. If you blame 'elites' with no further clarification for something, I'm going to assume you're pushing a dishonest agenda. If you were being honest, you'd identify your scary shadowy actors.
  - bastardoperator 5y ago
    It's not my job to disprove other's statement. It's their job to prove their statements when they make assertions. This is common argument religious zealots make. You can't disprove god, therefore god exists. It's silly at best. I have yet to see any proof or evidence that 'elites' are engaged in such activities.
- berberous 5y ago
  https://youtu.be/Y2EPgix5_5w https://youtu.be/Y2EPgix5_5w The elites, like any other group, have a culture and a worldview shaped by it. They believe similar things, read similar news sources, have similar incentives and goals, etc.
- philwelch 5y ago
  "We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation." -- Jen Psaki, White House Press Secretary
Hamuko 5y ago
What kind of 1st Amendment issues are there with Facebook and Twitter of all places?
- z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
  How about every single one of them. If they didn't want to be treated as public forums they shouldn't have sought and fought so hard to monopolize themselves and position themselves where they are.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    That's not at all what the First Amendment says.
torgoguys 5y ago
Ummm...BMJ is close to the very definition of 'elites' with regard to medicine. This circumstance goes against the typical complaints of things being as simple as "elites controlling the narrative."
baby 5y ago
No. Pretty much that’s their answer to the backlash that they are platforms helping spread misinformation.
DarknessFalls 5y ago
Facebook and Twitter have very specific policies against hate speech and inciting violence. This caused a lot of extremists on the American political right to be banned. That isn't elitism or censorship. It's enforcing their ToS, which as a private business, they have every right to do. I also think you're confused about what an 'elite' actually is. Spoonfed, entitled, whining, bitching opportunists like Trump fit that bill. And don't even pretend this isn't the side you're on.
- Flankk 5y ago
  The private business argument is weak as you're really pointing to the freedom that businesses employ. Quite obviously censorship runs contrary to the idea of freedom and the spirit of the law. Private industry does not have an inherent right to censorship, it is only legal currently because social media is a relatively new form of communication. This censorship has clearly been disruptive and since social media is essentially serving the role of a telecommunications provider those laws surrounding their freedoms are likely to change. You have to be careful because just because something is legal doesn't make it right. Social media companies can also read your private messages and share your private photos but that wouldn't make it right.
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    >Private industry does not have an inherent right to censorship Facebook and Twitter both enjoy the rights bestowed upon them by the First Amendment to remove content as they see fit. Requiring Facebook and Twitter to host content that they don't want would violate their First Amendment rights.
    - Flankk 5y ago
      The first amendment has nothing to do with that. The first amendment protects the individual and the press from government censorship. As I said, the spirit of the law is to protect from censorship. Unfortunately social media companies are abusing their power.
eacafdcbac 5y ago
The Internet is not, and has never been, a "public forum." At the end of the day the only piece of hardware you own is (probably) the one on your desk. You may put whatever data you want into it, but it's no one's responsibility to share that data. Beyond that the suggestion that all user's data should be shared equally is inherently flawed.
- tester756 5y ago
  >The Internet is not, and has never been, a "public forum." Internet is public utility just like roads. There's probably no other way around it instead of treating stuff like Facebook as a partly private business and partly public utility.
- Thorncorona 5y ago
  I don’t think these types of arguments that proclaim the internet is owned by private entities make any sense. The point of the parent comment was to discuss advocacy for a alternative and your comment essentially is replying well this is how it is currently so nothing can be done.
- cracell 5y ago
  I would strongly argue that coordinated censorship of media should be illegal. It's not today. But is it in society's interest that a small group of elites gets to decide what we can discuss on our primary discussion platforms?
- CursedUrn 5y ago
  Why isn't it a public forum? The Internet has largely replaced all traditional public fora.
dang 5y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. It's much too predictable and tedious. I realize this is begging for an "aha! the elites are proving the point!" response—but really no, we just don't want threads to clog up with low-information, high-indignation rhetoric. If you want to be all non-elitey within those params, have at it. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102.
- webdoodle 5y ago
  Detaching a thread, that's new (to me). I guess it's better than all out censorship, but not much better than Reddit collapsing threads that get downvoted by bots. I'm sorry if my meager comment became work for you, however you do realize you are modding a 'hacker' forum, where social engineering is the purest and earliest form of 'hacking'? Consider that most of the original 'hackers' are/were looking for social equality, now while social media has been infiltrated by big money 'elites' to squash the lamentations of the poor and impoverished. Lastly, John D Rockefeller only bought into newspapers after Ida Tarbell exposed the ills he was incurring on American society. If one can't wail at the wall of propaganda on a hacker news forum, where can impoverished ideologists still have a voice? All the main social media sites have been bought by 'elites', or hacked by their cohorts into oblivion when they don't play ball.
  - dang 5y ago
    I feel for your plight, but our first duty is to try to prevent this place from degenerating—or at least to stave that off as long as possible (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=stave%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), and it's quite clear that ideological wailing is one of the factors that most needs to be dampened if we're to achieve that. The best I can offer you is that the opposing wailings are just as dampened.

bastardoperator 5y ago

Pot meet kettle. You're spreading propaganda about propaganda. I need concrete evidence of who these 'elites' are. Names, dates, actionable steps taken by individuals, and proof of the agenda. If you can't provide these basic data points, from this vantage point you're no different then the folks you're complaining about. This has nothing to do with 1A. Businesses have the right to refuse service if you're being too loud in their establishment. Sorry, not sorry.

Thetawaves 5y ago
As if Facebook doesn't have an entire division doing this exact thing. We can't name specific names, because there are no specific names. These are institutions, and their orders flow down from the top. Your comment is 100% disingenuous.
mariavillosa 5y ago
>This has nothing to do with 1A. Businesses have the right to refuse service if you're being too loud in their establishment. Sorry, not sorry. If the purpose of 1a is to foster a society where speech is democratic, then it does, because corporations have largely replaced governments as the primary arbiters of information. So philosophically, the idea behind it is very relevant. The kind of power that governments abused, leading to 1a, is in some ways analogous to corporate power today. Whether that analogy is valid is the debate, right? I'm not from the US, but I wonder - just like how liberalism radically reimagined governance and the role of the commons in their relationship to the state, I wonder how a revolution this century could radically reimagine the digital commons. What will seem like obvious, basic digital rights, 100 years from now, that are completely unimaginable to my digitally medieval brain, like a preliberal medieval peasant?
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  It’s pretty easy to opt out of corporate dystopia without being jailed or murdered. People love to brag about how they quit social media. This sounds like people want to have the benefits of these platforms without accepting the trade offs.
  - mariavillosa 5y ago
    >It’s pretty easy to opt out of corporate dystopia >People love to brag about how they quit social media. Social media is the tip of the dystopic iceberg
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      Sure, but it’s a different dystopia than Gibson or Dick our Paul Verhoucen (sp?) predicted. They reflect common, primal human fears and are not indicative of insight. Just as my fear of heights does not provide wisdom against constructing/operating tall things - whether it be buildings, pyramids, or airplane flights.
- bastardoperator 5y ago
  That's not the purpose of the 1A. If you read 1A it's fairly basic. Congress shall make no law... 1A protects you from the government. If we dive deeper into the civil rights act no business serving the public can discriminate because of a customer's national origin, sex, religion, color, or race Unless someone can prove people are being removed from platforms for reasons above companies are well within their rights to refuse service.
  - mariavillosa 5y ago
    > That's not the purpose of the 1A. If you read 1A it's fairly basic. >Congress... Right, at the time of writing, that would have been perceived as the gravest threat to free expression. But I don't think that's still the case. > Unless someone can prove people are being removed from platforms for reasons above companies are well within their rights to refuse service. Agreed completely, I'm not making a legal claim. My claim attempts to stand on the moral philosophy behind these laws.
slowmovintarget 5y ago
The irony is, your argument is the Appeal to Ignorance fallacy.
Svettie 5y ago
No, this isn't a trial. It's OK to raise ideas up for others' consideration. The absence of obvious evidence doesn't mean the thing itself isn't happening. There is also a big difference between one person's voice on a platform, and a decision-maker of the platform who is creating policy/process for filtering those voices.
- _lqaf 5y ago
  Bitching about 'the elites' is garbage. It is a contentless description unless you identify who you're bitching about, primarily used as a way to get others to agree with you by substituting their own conception of 'elitists'. If you blame 'elites' with no further clarification for something, I'm going to assume you're pushing a dishonest agenda. If you were being honest, you'd identify your scary shadowy actors.
- bastardoperator 5y ago
  It's not my job to disprove other's statement. It's their job to prove their statements when they make assertions. This is common argument religious zealots make. You can't disprove god, therefore god exists. It's silly at best. I have yet to see any proof or evidence that 'elites' are engaged in such activities.
berberous 5y ago
https://youtu.be/Y2EPgix5_5w https://youtu.be/Y2EPgix5_5w The elites, like any other group, have a culture and a worldview shaped by it. They believe similar things, read similar news sources, have similar incentives and goals, etc.
philwelch 5y ago
"We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation." -- Jen Psaki, White House Press Secretary

Hamuko 5y ago

What kind of 1st Amendment issues are there with Facebook and Twitter of all places?

z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
How about every single one of them. If they didn't want to be treated as public forums they shouldn't have sought and fought so hard to monopolize themselves and position themselves where they are.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  That's not at all what the First Amendment says.

torgoguys 5y ago

Ummm...BMJ is close to the very definition of 'elites' with regard to medicine. This circumstance goes against the typical complaints of things being as simple as "elites controlling the narrative."

baby 5y ago

No. Pretty much that’s their answer to the backlash that they are platforms helping spread misinformation.

DarknessFalls 5y ago

Facebook and Twitter have very specific policies against hate speech and inciting violence. This caused a lot of extremists on the American political right to be banned. That isn't elitism or censorship. It's enforcing their ToS, which as a private business, they have every right to do. I also think you're confused about what an 'elite' actually is. Spoonfed, entitled, whining, bitching opportunists like Trump fit that bill. And don't even pretend this isn't the side you're on.

Flankk 5y ago
The private business argument is weak as you're really pointing to the freedom that businesses employ. Quite obviously censorship runs contrary to the idea of freedom and the spirit of the law. Private industry does not have an inherent right to censorship, it is only legal currently because social media is a relatively new form of communication. This censorship has clearly been disruptive and since social media is essentially serving the role of a telecommunications provider those laws surrounding their freedoms are likely to change. You have to be careful because just because something is legal doesn't make it right. Social media companies can also read your private messages and share your private photos but that wouldn't make it right.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  >Private industry does not have an inherent right to censorship Facebook and Twitter both enjoy the rights bestowed upon them by the First Amendment to remove content as they see fit. Requiring Facebook and Twitter to host content that they don't want would violate their First Amendment rights.
  - Flankk 5y ago
    The first amendment has nothing to do with that. The first amendment protects the individual and the press from government censorship. As I said, the spirit of the law is to protect from censorship. Unfortunately social media companies are abusing their power.

eacafdcbac 5y ago

The Internet is not, and has never been, a "public forum." At the end of the day the only piece of hardware you own is (probably) the one on your desk. You may put whatever data you want into it, but it's no one's responsibility to share that data. Beyond that the suggestion that all user's data should be shared equally is inherently flawed.

tester756 5y ago
>The Internet is not, and has never been, a "public forum." Internet is public utility just like roads. There's probably no other way around it instead of treating stuff like Facebook as a partly private business and partly public utility.
Thorncorona 5y ago
I don’t think these types of arguments that proclaim the internet is owned by private entities make any sense. The point of the parent comment was to discuss advocacy for a alternative and your comment essentially is replying well this is how it is currently so nothing can be done.
cracell 5y ago
I would strongly argue that coordinated censorship of media should be illegal. It's not today. But is it in society's interest that a small group of elites gets to decide what we can discuss on our primary discussion platforms?
CursedUrn 5y ago
Why isn't it a public forum? The Internet has largely replaced all traditional public fora.

dang 5y ago

Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. It's much too predictable and tedious. I realize this is begging for an "aha! the elites are proving the point!" response—but really no, we just don't want threads to clog up with low-information, high-indignation rhetoric. If you want to be all non-elitey within those params, have at it. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29596102.

webdoodle 5y ago
Detaching a thread, that's new (to me). I guess it's better than all out censorship, but not much better than Reddit collapsing threads that get downvoted by bots. I'm sorry if my meager comment became work for you, however you do realize you are modding a 'hacker' forum, where social engineering is the purest and earliest form of 'hacking'? Consider that most of the original 'hackers' are/were looking for social equality, now while social media has been infiltrated by big money 'elites' to squash the lamentations of the poor and impoverished. Lastly, John D Rockefeller only bought into newspapers after Ida Tarbell exposed the ills he was incurring on American society. If one can't wail at the wall of propaganda on a hacker news forum, where can impoverished ideologists still have a voice? All the main social media sites have been bought by 'elites', or hacked by their cohorts into oblivion when they don't play ball.
- dang 5y ago
  I feel for your plight, but our first duty is to try to prevent this place from degenerating—or at least to stave that off as long as possible (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=stave%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), and it's quite clear that ideological wailing is one of the factors that most needs to be dampened if we're to achieve that. The best I can offer you is that the opposing wailings are just as dampened.