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This is how big tech does damage to humans. Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typi

This is how big tech does damage to humans. Love it or hate it, the online world is our current public square. A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations that not only ban people for reasons many people agree with, but also for insane things like this. There is no appeal unless you convince enough others (using another public square) you are right and they also scream for you. Eventually, all of us that are 'ok' with this will end up being banned from one service or another for life, with no appeal, and thats that. A perfectly pristine public square filled not with people, but consumers staring at advertising boards. I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture. I don't like how this makes me feel.

FreeTrade 4y ago
These megacorporations answer that you're using a 'private platform' - the answer is to use a public platform. https://youtu.be/SkaaPcjKI2E https://youtu.be/SkaaPcjKI2E
- jwolfe 4y ago
  It should be noted that this is self-promotion.
bandyaboot 4y ago
> I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture. When a giant corporation says “here’s our private property, use it as your public square”, say “fuck off”.
iasay 4y ago
Worth pointing out that more life exists outside the corporate run stages. Part of their trick is to make you think that the only way of life is via their platforms. I’m not and never have been a Twitter or or TikTok or Facebook member.
- lin83 4y ago
  I also avoid those platforms but that also means self-exclusion from entire communities. I've seen large groups (DnD groups, gaming/sports clubs, obscure tech forums etc) being swallowed wholesale by Facebook, then Reddit and now Discord. That may not matter for a random game group but unfortunately Twitter is where most of the worlds journalists post and network.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    Where I live now, most sports and hobby clubs coordinate solely via Facebook. If you don't have a FB account (like myself, currently), you are shit out of luck when it comes to finding out what's going on where/when.
    - iasay 4y ago
      Meetup.com is still working out well for me. Also everyone knows everyone so you end up with a vast contacts network after a bit.
- whichdan 4y ago
  Sure, but getting hundreds or thousands of people to join your Mastodon instance or whatever is a huge barrier when Twitter works fine /most/ of the time.
  - iasay 4y ago
    Or, you know, in real life. Which was more my point. I've done more networking face to face over the last couple of years than I ever got done using the Internet.
- smaryjerry 4y ago
  I don’t think it’s a trick at all, it’s actually much worse than being kicked out of a public square. Making YouTube videos or Tweets or Facebook posts can be your job and facilitate your entire form of income. You spend 10 years cultivating a following and if you say or do the wrong thing, you don’t just lose the public square, you basically get fired. Yea you can try to diversify but the average person doesn’t do this, they build something somewhere specific. These platforms are tremendously important, both for speech and for peoples livelihoods. Banning people and the appeals should be much more of a delicate process than currently. Right now these moderators are akin to police departments with no court system. One day we will enact laws that force companies of certain sizes to have an appeal process, or in some way dedicate resources to accurate appeals, or maybe just force companies to keep records of the ban and give users the right to sue for mistakes, similar to workers have for with employers. We almost need an entirely new public court system to manage that process so the burden isn’t on companies or users. I don’t have the answers but at some point consumer rights will be needed to stop abuse or lethargy in moderation of important decisions.
bdhajaona 4y ago
> Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations Here's the problem I have with this analogy. Is it analogous to a public square (as in public property, owned by the state, maintained by tax payer money)? Or is it a private property that allows people to congregate for free but puts up ads to raise money, and many consider it as good as a public square, because most people they like hang out here. And like any business, they choose to deny service to some users (and not all users agree on this). Also, there are multiple such private spaces. Maybe the real solution is just like in the physical world, there should be state owned online spaces that are real "public spaces" and denying service here would be the govt denying rights.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  See, I think you got into the area that I am troubled by. I will state two things I consider to be true that are mutually exclusive: * Online spaces (facebook, twitter, etc), when they reach a certain level, are de-facto public spaces and excluding people from it by big tech is harmful to humanity. * Online spaces owned by a private corporation is for their benefit, not humanities, and forcing them to keep others on them is an infringement of property rights. ... I am a human and I can simultaneously hold views that exclude each other. I wish I knew a way to make these consistent.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    The law deals with this all the time, but it becomes complex when you cross jurisdiction boundaries. If a corporation wants to operate a public space, like a common area within a company town, you generally have to follow the law on what speech is allowed in that space. If your square is in the US, you have to allow Nazis to protest, but if it's in Germany, you probably have a duty to call the police on the Nazis to stop them. What do you do? Corporations often operate public squares to their benefit, so I have no problem with them having to follow local laws on what needs to happen in that public square. Google already personalizes your search results, and Facebook personalizes your feed. They can add local laws into that personalization algorithm. Edit: Updated the example to be correct.
booleandilemma 4y ago
Eh, I don't buy the public square argument. The online world is a cesspool filled with bots and crazy people. I don't need to voice my opinion on Twitter, nor is Twitter a place I need to be. What matters is how we relate to the people around us, in our communities. Your neighbor isn't a bot, the barista at the coffee shop isn't a russian troll. We need to stop taking the "online world" so seriously and connect with the people around us more.
- ratww 4y ago
  The real world is also a cesspool filled with crazy people and people trying to abuse the system (something analogous to bots). Also spammers and harassers. The difference is that on the real world public squares there’s no amplification effect that we have on those platforms, save for some very closely watched exceptions (politicians, celebrities). Also very little anonymity.
  - b112 4y ago
    The real world is also a cesspool filled with crazy people and people trying to abuse the system (something analogous to bots No, the real world is an excellent place, filled with great people everywhere. There is no comparison with the twitter/facebook mob, where 99,99% of people strive for your attention, for monetary gain.
    - ratww 4y ago
      > No, the real world is an excellent place, filled with great people everywhere. The internet is also filled with those same people. That includes Twitter and Facebook. The reason the bad ones are are extra loud in the internet is because some websites amplify their messages, whereas normal people don’t want the extra attention and prefer privacy.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  If I am interpreting this correctly, and I may not be, it seems like you are saying "The online world does not contain public squares, and that is because we need to change what everyone else in the world considers a public square." If I am interpreting that correctly, I don't know what I can add here. I don't necessarily disagree, but I think we have moved past that possibility. How many of us know our neighbors and talk to them? I've lived in my home for a few years and I don't even know their names fully. But, I now know yours and the fact we (at least slightly) disagree. Right or wrong, I think humanity has moved on and we are now connected.
_jal 4y ago
Twitter is not "the public square". It is a night club. Confusing private, for-profit businesses for public assets does a disservice to, and leads to ideas that are damaging for, both.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  The only night club.
  - motoxpro 4y ago
    Ironically this is how night clubs work, too. One gets a monopoly/gets popular and everyone goes there for a time until it because uncool and people move on to the next cool club. In social media see LiveJournal -> MySpace -> Facebook -> Tiktok. Each had a monopoly at the time until something cooler came along. The tenure also, ironically, seems to be around the same duration of a popular nightclub. Also, don't mistake user bases for monoliths in this analogy, < 18 moved on from facebook a long time ago, > 50 may skip Tiktok entirely but they showed up years after ~18 year olds did so tenure is still relevant.
    - dasil003 4y ago
      This is not a good take. First, it's not true that the most popular club has a monopoly in any meaningful sense. But even granting you that farcical premise: any "monopoly" effect is on a city-wide basis and does not scale, and does not trend towards global winner-take-all outcomes that social media does.
      - motoxpro 4y ago
        I'm not sure which night clubs you are going to, but "popular" ones are very much monopolies. Sure, the local bar that plays music isn't a monopoly, but neither is the "small" social network. You won't see John Mayer in a small night club and you also wont see him on a small social media platform. John creates lock-in for the other high status participants at the club, just like the content creators create lock-in for you being on social media (or HN in this case). I can walk next door, but I have a worse experience in both cases because they have a monopoly over a network is valuable. Your second point of the global nature misses the point I was making. Social things evolve. Whether on a global scale, country scale, or city level. Assuming there is a social construct that will "just work" until the end of time seems naive. But hey, if we are all using Twitter and Facebook in 20-30 years rather than the new social media company that has come to prominence then it will be a provably wrong take :). Or maybe a better way to put it is if the next generation is using them, because certain cohorts (see original post) will continue to use it because thats where their network is, but younger people get no utility because their network isnt there. See twitter and facebook.
lebed2045 4y ago
I’m ex Facebook software engineer (even had selfie with Zuckerberg as the avatar picture) who got banned on Facebook. Up to this day I have no clue what for. But it’s extremely annoying because I lost lots of photos that I didn’t back up and close to thousand contracts of people. Users should definitely own this data, not a corporation.
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  The irony here is that I deleted my FB years ago and back then at least, FB only permitted deleting one photo at a time. Took me well over an hour to delete all of my photos. In hindsight, I should've just done something obviously ban-able instead.
  - nier 4y ago
    There’s no guarantee that either method results in your photos being actually deleted.
    - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
      I'm aware of that, I just wanted them removed from the public view.
  - stoicjumbotron 4y ago
    Has the deleting single photo thing resolved by now? I too remember deleting close to 100s of photos one by one.
    - nephanth 4y ago
      Iirc it is, at least if you live in Europe
- walls 4y ago
  - 4y ago
Forgeties79 4y ago
I am so tired of the public square analogy. You don’t need Twitter. You don’t need Facebook. You don’t need Reddit. And what’s more, you can still read them if you’re banned. If you think it’s ok for a restaurant to turn you away because of a dress code, then this is a non-issue. The are several major platforms you can use as a megaphone, just like you have plenty of restaurants to choose from for your meal. If you are systematically getting banned from each social media platform and being “cut off from the public square,” that says more about you than it does the current state of speech.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > And what’s more, you can still read them if you’re banned. That is changing and in many places already no longer true.
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    Such as?
    - sneak 4y ago
      Instagram.
      - Forgeties79 4y ago
        IG has always hobbled the browser version and always restricted access without an account. It’s also pretty easy to just set up a new account on a different machine.
    - paganel 4y ago
      Also FB private groups that may be of interest to the user. For example many football club-related groups are private for obvious reasons, and, as such, getting kicked out of FB also means getting kicked out of your local supporters' forum where the online discussions happen. Yes, people from that group also meet irl, but not all of them attend those meetings and those meetings happen, at most, once every week (after the football season starts). For example we're out-season now but this is also the time of some of the most heated and interesting discussions, because right now we're in the middle of the transfer season.
camillomiller 4y ago
Now take this, and multiply it for Zuckerberg’s idea of a multiverse.
jsnell 4y ago
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  Forcing users to acknowledge their sins on a platform, when none are committed, is an issue. It reminds me of struggle sessions. I will use an extreme case (unrealistic) to prove the point: If you were forced, every day, to say 'XXXXXX cereal company is the best in the world, and they are greeeat.' before you were allowed to eat your toast, you will eventually start to believe this. Ok, maybe not you - but humanity isn't as strong willed as you are perhaps.
  - emn13 4y ago
    Perhaps this is an unconstructive aside, but it's a pet peeve of mine how often we present this kind of thought experiments in a way that pretends it's just the unwashed masses that are vulnerable to whatever manipulation is being discussed. I really doubt it. I'd rather we internalize that you and me are almost certainly also vulnerable to serious misjudgements when exposed to similar situations. Best case: you're right, and strong-willed indivuduals exist and are immune. But worst case we're all worshiping Cthulhu without even realizing it, just because we were too proud to practice good informational hygiene.
- serf 4y ago
  >No meaningful damage was done to a human here. The author would get unsuspended immediately if they chose to delete the tweet, and knows it. forcing a human to submit is absolutely damaging, more-so when the judgement is egregiously inhumane, incorrect, and final.
  - emn13 4y ago
    Clearly twitter is in the wrong here. But making a fundamentalist point about every minor issue you encounter isn't ideal either. I think it's entirely reasonable to expect people to pick their battles, rather than expect the whole world to organize around protecting their ego even in clearly irrelevant cases. There's nothing wrong with criticizing the policies that caused this. But I have no illusions that there are any policies that would be perfect, nor that the tradeoffs here are trivial. If everybody tried to be this fundamentalist, we'd still be stuck in caves fighting about whose corner is whose. There's a balance between avoiding erosion of sound principles, and being part of a large, constructive collective. So this battle is fine as long as were clear what it's about: the principle; not the specific post. And as such: being forced to do _anything_ with respect to that specific post isn't worth quibbling about. It's a fine example to get people talking, and that's it. If the author is personally harmed by is sudden lack of access to twitter, then he should consider choosing not to fight on this detail. It's a cute cat video, not a whistleblower talking about grave misconduct or whatever.
juanani 4y ago
ricardobeat 4y ago
I always wonder why not just rely on the same user reporting and automation systems to downrank, gray out, hide from indexing, mark content as controversial, instead of banning entire user accounts? Then repeat offenders can be banned with good reason. It seems absurdly heavy handed to remove legitimate accounts, irreversibly and without recourse, for a single post or comment, this should not be legal.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  I think your suggestion is better than the alternative we have now - but I think its not the right one either. What if the majority of people strongly disagree with a minority groups statements or cries for help? What if the users join a mass flagging / downvoting / reporting campaign (either purposefully, or stand-alone-complex style) to exclude these users. If the statement is "Maybe the majority is telling you they don't like you, asshole" then consider the 1950/1960's. I would state that a significant portion of the US was torn on whether a group should be treated the same as other groups. During that time, I am almost positive if we had this policy, the minority group would have been 'grayed out', 'hidden from indexing', 'marked content as controversial.' Do I have a better suggestion? No. No I don't. I think yours is better than what we have now, but the tyranny of the majority is a thing.
XorNot 4y ago
The public square argument is a distraction and it goes nowhere. What needs to be called out is Twitter just being terrible at enforcing their own TOS, and the human review process apparently having no oversight or consequences for responses like the author received. This is a straightforward problem of bad and inconsistent service quality.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  And the only way to fix it is regulation — with teeth — of privately-owned public communications platforms. Does anyone see another way that could work?
themitigating 4y ago
These global public squares didn't exist until social media so I don't consider it a human right.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  I've said it elsewhere in hnn today but I can say it again - I simultaneously think you are right and wrong. * These global services are de-facto public squares and forcing people out of them is to the detriment of humanity. * Private corporations shouldn't have their property stolen/appropriated by calling them public squares. I am a human and that lets me hold contradictory thoughts. I don't know a way to fix this.
  - AtlasBarfed 4y ago
    Utilities have to deal with this contradiction, they build their critical services on public land.
- haswell 4y ago
  The previous non-existence of certain technology isn't enough on its own to make this determination. It's also necessary to look at the overall state of a society to tease out the true consequences of these kinds of issues. I think a consequentialist lens is helpful here. If your local municipality started preventing people who had said objectionable things from crossing into the town via a public road, it would not follow that this is just fine because at one time, roads didn't exist. If you take a step back, and look at it as an issue of freedom of association and/or free speech, things get a lot murkier. If an entire society morphs itself to use those private entities for public discourse, at some point it almost doesn't matter that the entity is private, if the ultimate outcome is a serious violation of one's rights to associate/speak. This is at odds with the expectations a private company rightly has about its ability to do business with whom they please, and this is why the issue is so contentious. Neither side of this issue stands on solid ground.
iso1631 4y ago
There are many "public squares" in the world owned by corporations -- 592 in New York City alone including 168 plazas. They don't have the same protections for their users that a true public square has, but they're cheaper for the average voter, and that's what we care about.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Where are the legal recourses? Are EULAs that ironclad? And should you lose all "your" data? It should be a law that days bans from companies must allow you to download your data, especially snt Publix presence site.
safety1st 4y ago
Here's a fun story. I see that this post is from fanbyte.com. Existing got me banned from fanbyte.com and all of the websites they own. Specifically, existing in a particular country. Not an exotic or unusual one on an embargo list or something -- just some country that Fanbyte felt they weren't earning enough profit from. They banned the entire populations of about ten countries from their entire network of websites earlier this year, for that reason. If this guy who got banned from Twitter works for Fanbyte, I have no sympathy. I'll never know the details of the story though, because Fanbyte is out there banning entire nations.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  Don't have sympathy for an individual - instead, consider the path this is taking humanity down and consider what happened to you. A bigtech company made the decision that the voices from your country were not worth being heard so banned you from global discussions. Individuals can also be banned, with no recourse, due to an AI model gone awry. How do we deal with this and make things better? Legit question - I don't know myself and it eats at me sometimes.
- starkd 4y ago
  But could that be Fanbyte's way of dealing with a specific country's laws? Perhaps they don't have the manpower and those countries are small enough that the only cost effective option is to just not operate in those countries.
  - SSLy 4y ago
    Somehow it's only Fanbyte that have this problem with people in Turkey / Serbia etc. Why has no other publisher went to such measures?
    - starkd 4y ago
      But different companies can make entirely different business decisions in such situations. Another company may decide devoting extra resources is worth it. It is a subjective value assessment that can go either way.
lapcat 4y ago
There are plenty of public places in the US, but the so-called "public square" where strangers gather to debate is a total myth. It does not exist anywhere, and I'm not sure it ever has existed. Certainly not in my lifetime, anywhere I've ever lived. Friends do gather in public squares to talk or lounge or listen to concerts or whatever. But the kind of thing that happens on Twitter, or on HN for that matter, does not happen IRL. Occasionally there's a crazy preacher who attempts to address a crowd of strangers, but mostly the crazy preachers get ignored or ridiculed. There's no real, serious discussion and debate in the public squares among people who didn't already know each other. You can go to an open city council meeting to discuss and debate public issues, but those meetings are strictly governed by rules and moderated.
- toxicFork 4y ago
  It existed in ancient Greece at least
  - lapcat 4y ago
    I have no first-hand knowledge of this, but if you have to go back 2500 years for an example... ;-)
  - tenebrisalietum 4y ago
    Ancient towns were small enough, everyone likely knew each other.
spinny 4y ago
Not to mention the Orwellian proposition: "delete the pic we deemed wrong so we can unban you". Apparently it's hard to just delete the offending pic, it's better to teach you a lesson and make you do it. There are four lights
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  I agree - it’s modern day struggle sessions. There are four lights.
- ls15 4y ago
  > Apparently it's hard to just delete the offending pic Now that would be censorship! /s
- netsharc 4y ago
  It's even worse, "by deleting the pic, you agree with our decision that it was wrong.". "Yes master, this video of a cat video game is revenge porn and I'm sorry for posting it!"...
- est31 4y ago
  Personally I prefer getting a message "delete this please" instead of some of my messages/pictures/etc. silently disappearing without me noticing. Ideally, they would make the pic not available to other users, but still available to me, and notify me that my account will get banned in $N days. Ideally, during that phase there would be the option to pay some minor amount of money and ask to get a human moderator involved to review your case.
  - piva00 4y ago
    > Ideally, they would make the pic not available to other users, but still available to me, and notify me that my account will get banned in $N days. During that phase you might even pay some minor amount of money and ask to get a human moderator involved to review your case. This would just become another revenue stream given enough time and changes of leadership around such a system. Treading a thin line on just how abusive they can be on the review process to extract money, it would be chock full of perverse incentives.
z9znz 4y ago
> I would love to know a way this can be solved Step 1. Hire humans and pay them enough to think (and communicate with customers). Step 2. Keep an audit trail of events and communications related to these ban situations. Those can be useful when escalating a dispute (to another human from Step 1, but someone with more authority to make judgement calls). Detection algorithms can still be used, but they should only be to flag potential bans. Any actual action taken must be done by a human from #1. Done.
- drdec 4y ago
  >Step 2. Keep an audit trail of events and communications related to these ban situations. Hard to imagine these companies, whose whole value proposition is in the data they collect, are neglecting to collect this data.
  - z9znz 4y ago
    I don't think they're collecing this type of data... because it almost doesn't exist. It's not like you have a back and forth communication with customer service (because there is no customer service group). You just have the one or two dispute statements you may have been allowed to submit, and then you have the predictable automatic denial replies. They probably do save the dispute claims. But that info is useless, both because it has no bearing on the outcome and because there's no oversight anyway.
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
Twitter is not the government? Twitter also is not really a public square, it's an advertiser-supported electronic press. If I own a printing press, I have the freedom to print what I want, including what people send me, and I also can not print what I want, including what people send me. It's my press. Want different rules, get your own or use someone elses. Because Twitter is a privately owned super-fast electronic press, administered at their whims, people should stop using it for things that matter unless they have an actual contract with the corporation. I don't rely on Twitter for anything other than entertainment. The fact that people expect rights and meaning with advertiser-supported stuff given to them for free is what's harmful.
- jwolfe 4y ago
  This metaphor also fails, in the existing regulatory framework. If you own a printing press and print something, you are liable for its contents. Twitter, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is not liable for content that its users post.
judge2020 4y ago
The thing with physical public squares is that they are self-regulated - if someone commits a crime, everyone runs away and someone calls the cops, and the offender effectively has their life ruined due to a criminal record. If someone goes around and starts yelling hate crimes at people on the street, they tend to learn their lesson when enough people take notice and confront the individual with a warning to stop. Unless you bring in real identities onto twitter, none of those societal protections will apply to social media. Nobody can do anything to spam/bot accounts if it's 1000 accounts being created every minute.
suction 4y ago
I only ever hear complaints from far-right people who want their speech to be free-er than other people’s or entities.
lkrubner 4y ago
>> I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture. It's possible that the answer is for society to simply go back in the other direction. Despite the initial promise of the Internet, it's possible it will never function as the new public square. Rather, we might have to go back to more traditional methods of expression, in physical spaces, or writing letters to elected officials. Or perhaps a body of ethics could be developed similar to the body of ethics that guides journalists. But that body of ethics, for journalists, grew up at a time when the USA had many thousands of newspapers, and none were dominant, so the power of the profession was balanced against the relatively small power of any one newspaper. This was back before the New York Times and the Washington Post emerged as national papers. It would be more difficult to develop a similar body of ethics for social media, since the whole space has already consolidated down to 4 major corporations, and there is no obvious profession that can assert a body of ethics independently of those 4 companies.
parkingrift 4y ago
>I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture. I don't like how this makes me feel. Easy. Stop banning people unless the content is illegal. Stop acting as moral police. Let the community police itself by burying offensive content. Give users absolute control over what they see. And ban bots. This “problem” only exists because Twitter wants to control what you see.
- satyrnein 4y ago
  The video in question seems to have been (incorrectly) flagged as either a revenge porn or upskirt video, which people have struggled to get taken down before the damage was done.
uncletaco 4y ago
> A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Growing up in Birmingham, AL I had a couple teachers who had dog bites and remembered the hoses from when they tried to shout out whatever they wanted in public squares. It's always interesting how people have such a rosy view of history when it comes to forming a much beloved but not well thought out belief.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  They remember the dog bites because its cases where the government acted illegally and were taken to task. Today, the governing actor of our virtual public squares are corporations - and a significant amount of people (maybe not you) seem to be ok with them taking what actions they wish.
  - chimeracoder 4y ago
    > They remember the dog bites because its cases where the government acted illegally and were taken to task. Uh, no. Society has whitewashed the history of the Civil Rights Movement, but popular sentiment at the time was not with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the other freedom riders, etc. Civilians and the government sometimes acted illegally, sure, but some of those actions were absolutely legal. (Not to mention that the government often leaned on citizens to take illegal vigilante action so that "the government" wouldn't have to - the distinction was not always clear cut). And either way, it's hard to make the argument that they were "taken to task. Even after Brown v. Board, it took over a decade for many local governments (even in the North!) to be forced into compliance. And the actual individuals responsible for the illegal actions rarely faced any serious consequences. EDIT: Clarified the point of legality.
    - uncletaco 4y ago
      The government acted legally. That was (and in a lot of cases still is) the problem. In fact most cities and local governments reserve the right to use hoses and dogs they just don't because it would be bad optics. As the saying goes "the more things change, the more they stay the same".
dhc02 4y ago
One way to look at this is that the natural state of things is that everyone has access to the local public square, and only a few have access to regional or national public squares. The early internet was a perturbation in this natural state, giving millions access to nationaland global distribution of their thoughts for no cost, but natural law is bringing us back to a steady state where you can only reach your friends, colleagues, and neighbors unless you make a career out of journalism, celebrity, big business, or politics.
gwnywg 4y ago
I had felt the same in 2015 when I got banned from Facebook for not providing my real data (they asked me to provide a photo of my ID which I thought and still think was silly). But then I realised how good it was for me (as a user) and started thinking maybe we should aim to go back to the 'small Internet'. By this I mean small forums, maybe chat rooms or something of that sort. I often go back in memories to the late 90's and remember how I felt using the Internet back then. Of course this is nostalgia, but sometimes I wonder if I can build something to get that feeling back.. like island of the 90's internet
- ecliptik 4y ago
  The "smol Internet" movement is what you're looking for. Returning to smaller online communities using things like Gopher, Gemini, fediverse, pubnixes, etc. https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol-internet https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol...
- duncan-donuts 4y ago
  I think about this too and know it’s mostly nostalgia too. I’m curious about community organized LANs and running older tech. I also concede that almost no one actually wants to run this shit so it seems very unlikely anyone would want it.
blueberrychpstx 4y ago
> A perfectly pristine public square filled not with people, but consumers staring at advertising boards. Just beautifully written. Do you happen to have a blog?
beebmam 4y ago
> the online world is our current public square That's right, and that's why virtually no one ever gets banned from using the internet. Twitter is not "the online world".
- turdit 4y ago
  that’s like saying a car is just one method of transportation. so if you get banned from using cars you have no right to complain. but i can tell from your spastic angry (not to mention logically incoherent) post you are a twitter user who’s afraid of their echo chamber changing
jaunkst 4y ago
That's a real issue. It's not just a monopoly in a competitive sense but also a monopoly on 'public squares'. Which is effectively against free speech. When a company or moderator has the power to ban you from a public space your are ostracized by a non-democratic panel, with unknown agendas.
octonion 4y ago
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
It can be solved by realizing that private websites ARE NOT public fora. They have never been, are not now, and will never be. HN has, and will again, removed comments that I have made again, particularly if they stray too far from the party line regarding cryptobros, SEObros, and devs who whore themselves out to ad companies when they could be doing actual real work that benefits humanity while making just a little teeny tiny less money but whores are whores so they'll keep on keeping on. I'm fine with that. And you should be too. If HN was a public square I could tell them to fuck off. Nothing I said would meet any community standards and obscenity triggers in any courtroom in any jurisdiction of any court in all of the United States. "Oh but HN isn't as big as Twit.." is bullshit and has been tried before. Anyone who makes this argument is so intellectually bankrupt they should be banned from the internet for being too stupid to operate an internet browser. You have the same "public square" rights in Times Square that you have in Lotsee Oklahoma (0.02 mi sq), which is smaller than Times Square (0.25 mi sq). Private parties can set arbitrary, capricious, subjective, unfair, and mean rules about what they allow on their platforms, and don't even have to set any rules besides "because we said so". Anything less is tyranny. edit: if public websites are TRUELY public fora, there could be a very strong argument made that hiding my comment due to downvotes is an assault on my rights, similar to covering my sign with a blanket as I try to agitate in ACTUAL, REAL, public squares for civil rights or the legalization of marijuana or the proselytizing of my TIMECUBE religion. Unless, of course there exists "important and real" free speech and "not important" free speech but allowing for that distinction is probably more dangerous than having no free speech at all...
giancarlostoro 4y ago
> This is how big tech does damage to humans. This being whatever AI flagged his post. I would not be surprised. I'm seeing a trend where, Facebook, Discord and I guess now Twitter are trying to use AI to moderate. It is going to backfire hard. Lots of blatantly bad things stay on their platform, but innocent nonsense gets you banned. Either their content moderators are really bad at their job, or silently protesting, or there's an AI involved. In my case someone posted a video featuring a giant spider on Facebook in a little girls hand, it was bigger than her face, my comment was a meme comment you see all over the internet "girl put that spider down we gotta set the house on fire" there's a recurring meme about burning homes to kill spiders due to arachnophobia. Innocent joke, not actually serious, I got a warning, I guess they thought I was actually advocating burning down a home, but I was not. I appealed and immediately not long after I was denied. There's an AI involved, and whoever does appeals is lazy or the AI itself, or has no concept of internet content memes.
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FreeTrade 4y ago

These megacorporations answer that you're using a 'private platform' - the answer is to use a public platform. https://youtu.be/SkaaPcjKI2E https://youtu.be/SkaaPcjKI2E

jwolfe 4y ago
It should be noted that this is self-promotion.

bandyaboot 4y ago

> I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture. When a giant corporation says “here’s our private property, use it as your public square”, say “fuck off”.

iasay 4y ago

Worth pointing out that more life exists outside the corporate run stages. Part of their trick is to make you think that the only way of life is via their platforms. I’m not and never have been a Twitter or or TikTok or Facebook member.

lin83 4y ago
I also avoid those platforms but that also means self-exclusion from entire communities. I've seen large groups (DnD groups, gaming/sports clubs, obscure tech forums etc) being swallowed wholesale by Facebook, then Reddit and now Discord. That may not matter for a random game group but unfortunately Twitter is where most of the worlds journalists post and network.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  Where I live now, most sports and hobby clubs coordinate solely via Facebook. If you don't have a FB account (like myself, currently), you are shit out of luck when it comes to finding out what's going on where/when.
  - iasay 4y ago
    Meetup.com is still working out well for me. Also everyone knows everyone so you end up with a vast contacts network after a bit.
whichdan 4y ago
Sure, but getting hundreds or thousands of people to join your Mastodon instance or whatever is a huge barrier when Twitter works fine /most/ of the time.
- iasay 4y ago
  Or, you know, in real life. Which was more my point. I've done more networking face to face over the last couple of years than I ever got done using the Internet.
smaryjerry 4y ago
I don’t think it’s a trick at all, it’s actually much worse than being kicked out of a public square. Making YouTube videos or Tweets or Facebook posts can be your job and facilitate your entire form of income. You spend 10 years cultivating a following and if you say or do the wrong thing, you don’t just lose the public square, you basically get fired. Yea you can try to diversify but the average person doesn’t do this, they build something somewhere specific. These platforms are tremendously important, both for speech and for peoples livelihoods. Banning people and the appeals should be much more of a delicate process than currently. Right now these moderators are akin to police departments with no court system. One day we will enact laws that force companies of certain sizes to have an appeal process, or in some way dedicate resources to accurate appeals, or maybe just force companies to keep records of the ban and give users the right to sue for mistakes, similar to workers have for with employers. We almost need an entirely new public court system to manage that process so the burden isn’t on companies or users. I don’t have the answers but at some point consumer rights will be needed to stop abuse or lethargy in moderation of important decisions.

bdhajaona 4y ago

> Currently, our public squares are owned by private megacorporations Here's the problem I have with this analogy. Is it analogous to a public square (as in public property, owned by the state, maintained by tax payer money)? Or is it a private property that allows people to congregate for free but puts up ads to raise money, and many consider it as good as a public square, because most people they like hang out here. And like any business, they choose to deny service to some users (and not all users agree on this). Also, there are multiple such private spaces. Maybe the real solution is just like in the physical world, there should be state owned online spaces that are real "public spaces" and denying service here would be the govt denying rights.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
See, I think you got into the area that I am troubled by. I will state two things I consider to be true that are mutually exclusive: * Online spaces (facebook, twitter, etc), when they reach a certain level, are de-facto public spaces and excluding people from it by big tech is harmful to humanity. * Online spaces owned by a private corporation is for their benefit, not humanities, and forcing them to keep others on them is an infringement of property rights. ... I am a human and I can simultaneously hold views that exclude each other. I wish I knew a way to make these consistent.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The law deals with this all the time, but it becomes complex when you cross jurisdiction boundaries. If a corporation wants to operate a public space, like a common area within a company town, you generally have to follow the law on what speech is allowed in that space. If your square is in the US, you have to allow Nazis to protest, but if it's in Germany, you probably have a duty to call the police on the Nazis to stop them. What do you do? Corporations often operate public squares to their benefit, so I have no problem with them having to follow local laws on what needs to happen in that public square. Google already personalizes your search results, and Facebook personalizes your feed. They can add local laws into that personalization algorithm. Edit: Updated the example to be correct.

booleandilemma 4y ago

Eh, I don't buy the public square argument. The online world is a cesspool filled with bots and crazy people. I don't need to voice my opinion on Twitter, nor is Twitter a place I need to be. What matters is how we relate to the people around us, in our communities. Your neighbor isn't a bot, the barista at the coffee shop isn't a russian troll. We need to stop taking the "online world" so seriously and connect with the people around us more.

ratww 4y ago
The real world is also a cesspool filled with crazy people and people trying to abuse the system (something analogous to bots). Also spammers and harassers. The difference is that on the real world public squares there’s no amplification effect that we have on those platforms, save for some very closely watched exceptions (politicians, celebrities). Also very little anonymity.
- b112 4y ago
  The real world is also a cesspool filled with crazy people and people trying to abuse the system (something analogous to bots No, the real world is an excellent place, filled with great people everywhere. There is no comparison with the twitter/facebook mob, where 99,99% of people strive for your attention, for monetary gain.
  - ratww 4y ago
    > No, the real world is an excellent place, filled with great people everywhere. The internet is also filled with those same people. That includes Twitter and Facebook. The reason the bad ones are are extra loud in the internet is because some websites amplify their messages, whereas normal people don’t want the extra attention and prefer privacy.
OrangeMonkey 4y ago
If I am interpreting this correctly, and I may not be, it seems like you are saying "The online world does not contain public squares, and that is because we need to change what everyone else in the world considers a public square." If I am interpreting that correctly, I don't know what I can add here. I don't necessarily disagree, but I think we have moved past that possibility. How many of us know our neighbors and talk to them? I've lived in my home for a few years and I don't even know their names fully. But, I now know yours and the fact we (at least slightly) disagree. Right or wrong, I think humanity has moved on and we are now connected.

_jal 4y ago

Twitter is not "the public square". It is a night club. Confusing private, for-profit businesses for public assets does a disservice to, and leads to ideas that are damaging for, both.

wrycoder 4y ago
The only night club.
- motoxpro 4y ago
  Ironically this is how night clubs work, too. One gets a monopoly/gets popular and everyone goes there for a time until it because uncool and people move on to the next cool club. In social media see LiveJournal -> MySpace -> Facebook -> Tiktok. Each had a monopoly at the time until something cooler came along. The tenure also, ironically, seems to be around the same duration of a popular nightclub. Also, don't mistake user bases for monoliths in this analogy, < 18 moved on from facebook a long time ago, > 50 may skip Tiktok entirely but they showed up years after ~18 year olds did so tenure is still relevant.
  - dasil003 4y ago
    This is not a good take. First, it's not true that the most popular club has a monopoly in any meaningful sense. But even granting you that farcical premise: any "monopoly" effect is on a city-wide basis and does not scale, and does not trend towards global winner-take-all outcomes that social media does.
    - motoxpro 4y ago
      I'm not sure which night clubs you are going to, but "popular" ones are very much monopolies. Sure, the local bar that plays music isn't a monopoly, but neither is the "small" social network. You won't see John Mayer in a small night club and you also wont see him on a small social media platform. John creates lock-in for the other high status participants at the club, just like the content creators create lock-in for you being on social media (or HN in this case). I can walk next door, but I have a worse experience in both cases because they have a monopoly over a network is valuable. Your second point of the global nature misses the point I was making. Social things evolve. Whether on a global scale, country scale, or city level. Assuming there is a social construct that will "just work" until the end of time seems naive. But hey, if we are all using Twitter and Facebook in 20-30 years rather than the new social media company that has come to prominence then it will be a provably wrong take :). Or maybe a better way to put it is if the next generation is using them, because certain cohorts (see original post) will continue to use it because thats where their network is, but younger people get no utility because their network isnt there. See twitter and facebook.

lebed2045 4y ago

I’m ex Facebook software engineer (even had selfie with Zuckerberg as the avatar picture) who got banned on Facebook. Up to this day I have no clue what for. But it’s extremely annoying because I lost lots of photos that I didn’t back up and close to thousand contracts of people. Users should definitely own this data, not a corporation.

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
The irony here is that I deleted my FB years ago and back then at least, FB only permitted deleting one photo at a time. Took me well over an hour to delete all of my photos. In hindsight, I should've just done something obviously ban-able instead.
- nier 4y ago
  There’s no guarantee that either method results in your photos being actually deleted.
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    I'm aware of that, I just wanted them removed from the public view.
- stoicjumbotron 4y ago
  Has the deleting single photo thing resolved by now? I too remember deleting close to 100s of photos one by one.
  - nephanth 4y ago
    Iirc it is, at least if you live in Europe
walls 4y ago
- 4y ago

Forgeties79 4y ago

I am so tired of the public square analogy. You don’t need Twitter. You don’t need Facebook. You don’t need Reddit. And what’s more, you can still read them if you’re banned. If you think it’s ok for a restaurant to turn you away because of a dress code, then this is a non-issue. The are several major platforms you can use as a megaphone, just like you have plenty of restaurants to choose from for your meal. If you are systematically getting banned from each social media platform and being “cut off from the public square,” that says more about you than it does the current state of speech.

jacquesm 4y ago
> And what’s more, you can still read them if you’re banned. That is changing and in many places already no longer true.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  Such as?
  - sneak 4y ago
    Instagram.
    - Forgeties79 4y ago
      IG has always hobbled the browser version and always restricted access without an account. It’s also pretty easy to just set up a new account on a different machine.
  - paganel 4y ago
    Also FB private groups that may be of interest to the user. For example many football club-related groups are private for obvious reasons, and, as such, getting kicked out of FB also means getting kicked out of your local supporters' forum where the online discussions happen. Yes, people from that group also meet irl, but not all of them attend those meetings and those meetings happen, at most, once every week (after the football season starts). For example we're out-season now but this is also the time of some of the most heated and interesting discussions, because right now we're in the middle of the transfer season.

camillomiller 4y ago

Now take this, and multiply it for Zuckerberg’s idea of a multiverse.

jsnell 4y ago

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
Forcing users to acknowledge their sins on a platform, when none are committed, is an issue. It reminds me of struggle sessions. I will use an extreme case (unrealistic) to prove the point: If you were forced, every day, to say 'XXXXXX cereal company is the best in the world, and they are greeeat.' before you were allowed to eat your toast, you will eventually start to believe this. Ok, maybe not you - but humanity isn't as strong willed as you are perhaps.
- emn13 4y ago
  Perhaps this is an unconstructive aside, but it's a pet peeve of mine how often we present this kind of thought experiments in a way that pretends it's just the unwashed masses that are vulnerable to whatever manipulation is being discussed. I really doubt it. I'd rather we internalize that you and me are almost certainly also vulnerable to serious misjudgements when exposed to similar situations. Best case: you're right, and strong-willed indivuduals exist and are immune. But worst case we're all worshiping Cthulhu without even realizing it, just because we were too proud to practice good informational hygiene.
serf 4y ago
>No meaningful damage was done to a human here. The author would get unsuspended immediately if they chose to delete the tweet, and knows it. forcing a human to submit is absolutely damaging, more-so when the judgement is egregiously inhumane, incorrect, and final.
- emn13 4y ago
  Clearly twitter is in the wrong here. But making a fundamentalist point about every minor issue you encounter isn't ideal either. I think it's entirely reasonable to expect people to pick their battles, rather than expect the whole world to organize around protecting their ego even in clearly irrelevant cases. There's nothing wrong with criticizing the policies that caused this. But I have no illusions that there are any policies that would be perfect, nor that the tradeoffs here are trivial. If everybody tried to be this fundamentalist, we'd still be stuck in caves fighting about whose corner is whose. There's a balance between avoiding erosion of sound principles, and being part of a large, constructive collective. So this battle is fine as long as were clear what it's about: the principle; not the specific post. And as such: being forced to do _anything_ with respect to that specific post isn't worth quibbling about. It's a fine example to get people talking, and that's it. If the author is personally harmed by is sudden lack of access to twitter, then he should consider choosing not to fight on this detail. It's a cute cat video, not a whistleblower talking about grave misconduct or whatever.

juanani 4y ago

ricardobeat 4y ago

I always wonder why not just rely on the same user reporting and automation systems to downrank, gray out, hide from indexing, mark content as controversial, instead of banning entire user accounts? Then repeat offenders can be banned with good reason. It seems absurdly heavy handed to remove legitimate accounts, irreversibly and without recourse, for a single post or comment, this should not be legal.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
I think your suggestion is better than the alternative we have now - but I think its not the right one either. What if the majority of people strongly disagree with a minority groups statements or cries for help? What if the users join a mass flagging / downvoting / reporting campaign (either purposefully, or stand-alone-complex style) to exclude these users. If the statement is "Maybe the majority is telling you they don't like you, asshole" then consider the 1950/1960's. I would state that a significant portion of the US was torn on whether a group should be treated the same as other groups. During that time, I am almost positive if we had this policy, the minority group would have been 'grayed out', 'hidden from indexing', 'marked content as controversial.' Do I have a better suggestion? No. No I don't. I think yours is better than what we have now, but the tyranny of the majority is a thing.

XorNot 4y ago

The public square argument is a distraction and it goes nowhere. What needs to be called out is Twitter just being terrible at enforcing their own TOS, and the human review process apparently having no oversight or consequences for responses like the author received. This is a straightforward problem of bad and inconsistent service quality.

CharlesW 4y ago
And the only way to fix it is regulation — with teeth — of privately-owned public communications platforms. Does anyone see another way that could work?

themitigating 4y ago

These global public squares didn't exist until social media so I don't consider it a human right.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
I've said it elsewhere in hnn today but I can say it again - I simultaneously think you are right and wrong. * These global services are de-facto public squares and forcing people out of them is to the detriment of humanity. * Private corporations shouldn't have their property stolen/appropriated by calling them public squares. I am a human and that lets me hold contradictory thoughts. I don't know a way to fix this.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Utilities have to deal with this contradiction, they build their critical services on public land.
haswell 4y ago
The previous non-existence of certain technology isn't enough on its own to make this determination. It's also necessary to look at the overall state of a society to tease out the true consequences of these kinds of issues. I think a consequentialist lens is helpful here. If your local municipality started preventing people who had said objectionable things from crossing into the town via a public road, it would not follow that this is just fine because at one time, roads didn't exist. If you take a step back, and look at it as an issue of freedom of association and/or free speech, things get a lot murkier. If an entire society morphs itself to use those private entities for public discourse, at some point it almost doesn't matter that the entity is private, if the ultimate outcome is a serious violation of one's rights to associate/speak. This is at odds with the expectations a private company rightly has about its ability to do business with whom they please, and this is why the issue is so contentious. Neither side of this issue stands on solid ground.

iso1631 4y ago

There are many "public squares" in the world owned by corporations -- 592 in New York City alone including 168 plazas. They don't have the same protections for their users that a true public square has, but they're cheaper for the average voter, and that's what we care about.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Where are the legal recourses? Are EULAs that ironclad? And should you lose all "your" data? It should be a law that days bans from companies must allow you to download your data, especially snt Publix presence site.

safety1st 4y ago

Here's a fun story. I see that this post is from fanbyte.com. Existing got me banned from fanbyte.com and all of the websites they own. Specifically, existing in a particular country. Not an exotic or unusual one on an embargo list or something -- just some country that Fanbyte felt they weren't earning enough profit from. They banned the entire populations of about ten countries from their entire network of websites earlier this year, for that reason. If this guy who got banned from Twitter works for Fanbyte, I have no sympathy. I'll never know the details of the story though, because Fanbyte is out there banning entire nations.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
Don't have sympathy for an individual - instead, consider the path this is taking humanity down and consider what happened to you. A bigtech company made the decision that the voices from your country were not worth being heard so banned you from global discussions. Individuals can also be banned, with no recourse, due to an AI model gone awry. How do we deal with this and make things better? Legit question - I don't know myself and it eats at me sometimes.
starkd 4y ago
But could that be Fanbyte's way of dealing with a specific country's laws? Perhaps they don't have the manpower and those countries are small enough that the only cost effective option is to just not operate in those countries.
- SSLy 4y ago
  Somehow it's only Fanbyte that have this problem with people in Turkey / Serbia etc. Why has no other publisher went to such measures?
  - starkd 4y ago
    But different companies can make entirely different business decisions in such situations. Another company may decide devoting extra resources is worth it. It is a subjective value assessment that can go either way.

lapcat 4y ago

There are plenty of public places in the US, but the so-called "public square" where strangers gather to debate is a total myth. It does not exist anywhere, and I'm not sure it ever has existed. Certainly not in my lifetime, anywhere I've ever lived. Friends do gather in public squares to talk or lounge or listen to concerts or whatever. But the kind of thing that happens on Twitter, or on HN for that matter, does not happen IRL. Occasionally there's a crazy preacher who attempts to address a crowd of strangers, but mostly the crazy preachers get ignored or ridiculed. There's no real, serious discussion and debate in the public squares among people who didn't already know each other. You can go to an open city council meeting to discuss and debate public issues, but those meetings are strictly governed by rules and moderated.

toxicFork 4y ago
It existed in ancient Greece at least
- lapcat 4y ago
  I have no first-hand knowledge of this, but if you have to go back 2500 years for an example... ;-)
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Ancient towns were small enough, everyone likely knew each other.

spinny 4y ago

Not to mention the Orwellian proposition: "delete the pic we deemed wrong so we can unban you". Apparently it's hard to just delete the offending pic, it's better to teach you a lesson and make you do it. There are four lights

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
I agree - it’s modern day struggle sessions. There are four lights.
ls15 4y ago
> Apparently it's hard to just delete the offending pic Now that would be censorship! /s
netsharc 4y ago
It's even worse, "by deleting the pic, you agree with our decision that it was wrong.". "Yes master, this video of a cat video game is revenge porn and I'm sorry for posting it!"...
est31 4y ago
Personally I prefer getting a message "delete this please" instead of some of my messages/pictures/etc. silently disappearing without me noticing. Ideally, they would make the pic not available to other users, but still available to me, and notify me that my account will get banned in $N days. Ideally, during that phase there would be the option to pay some minor amount of money and ask to get a human moderator involved to review your case.
- piva00 4y ago
  > Ideally, they would make the pic not available to other users, but still available to me, and notify me that my account will get banned in $N days. During that phase you might even pay some minor amount of money and ask to get a human moderator involved to review your case. This would just become another revenue stream given enough time and changes of leadership around such a system. Treading a thin line on just how abusive they can be on the review process to extract money, it would be chock full of perverse incentives.

z9znz 4y ago

> I would love to know a way this can be solved Step 1. Hire humans and pay them enough to think (and communicate with customers). Step 2. Keep an audit trail of events and communications related to these ban situations. Those can be useful when escalating a dispute (to another human from Step 1, but someone with more authority to make judgement calls). Detection algorithms can still be used, but they should only be to flag potential bans. Any actual action taken must be done by a human from #1. Done.

drdec 4y ago
>Step 2. Keep an audit trail of events and communications related to these ban situations. Hard to imagine these companies, whose whole value proposition is in the data they collect, are neglecting to collect this data.
- z9znz 4y ago
  I don't think they're collecing this type of data... because it almost doesn't exist. It's not like you have a back and forth communication with customer service (because there is no customer service group). You just have the one or two dispute statements you may have been allowed to submit, and then you have the predictable automatic denial replies. They probably do save the dispute claims. But that info is useless, both because it has no bearing on the outcome and because there's no oversight anyway.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

Twitter is not the government? Twitter also is not really a public square, it's an advertiser-supported electronic press. If I own a printing press, I have the freedom to print what I want, including what people send me, and I also can not print what I want, including what people send me. It's my press. Want different rules, get your own or use someone elses. Because Twitter is a privately owned super-fast electronic press, administered at their whims, people should stop using it for things that matter unless they have an actual contract with the corporation. I don't rely on Twitter for anything other than entertainment. The fact that people expect rights and meaning with advertiser-supported stuff given to them for free is what's harmful.

jwolfe 4y ago
This metaphor also fails, in the existing regulatory framework. If you own a printing press and print something, you are liable for its contents. Twitter, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, is not liable for content that its users post.

judge2020 4y ago

The thing with physical public squares is that they are self-regulated - if someone commits a crime, everyone runs away and someone calls the cops, and the offender effectively has their life ruined due to a criminal record. If someone goes around and starts yelling hate crimes at people on the street, they tend to learn their lesson when enough people take notice and confront the individual with a warning to stop. Unless you bring in real identities onto twitter, none of those societal protections will apply to social media. Nobody can do anything to spam/bot accounts if it's 1000 accounts being created every minute.

suction 4y ago

I only ever hear complaints from far-right people who want their speech to be free-er than other people’s or entities.

lkrubner 4y ago

>> I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture. It's possible that the answer is for society to simply go back in the other direction. Despite the initial promise of the Internet, it's possible it will never function as the new public square. Rather, we might have to go back to more traditional methods of expression, in physical spaces, or writing letters to elected officials. Or perhaps a body of ethics could be developed similar to the body of ethics that guides journalists. But that body of ethics, for journalists, grew up at a time when the USA had many thousands of newspapers, and none were dominant, so the power of the profession was balanced against the relatively small power of any one newspaper. This was back before the New York Times and the Washington Post emerged as national papers. It would be more difficult to develop a similar body of ethics for social media, since the whole space has already consolidated down to 4 major corporations, and there is no obvious profession that can assert a body of ethics independently of those 4 companies.

parkingrift 4y ago

>I would love to know a way this can be solved as its painting a depressing picture. I don't like how this makes me feel. Easy. Stop banning people unless the content is illegal. Stop acting as moral police. Let the community police itself by burying offensive content. Give users absolute control over what they see. And ban bots. This “problem” only exists because Twitter wants to control what you see.

satyrnein 4y ago
The video in question seems to have been (incorrectly) flagged as either a revenge porn or upskirt video, which people have struggled to get taken down before the damage was done.

uncletaco 4y ago

> A public square, in the united states, has typically been an area where people can shout out their concerns or whatever they want to anyone who can listen and the government cannot stop it. Growing up in Birmingham, AL I had a couple teachers who had dog bites and remembered the hoses from when they tried to shout out whatever they wanted in public squares. It's always interesting how people have such a rosy view of history when it comes to forming a much beloved but not well thought out belief.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
They remember the dog bites because its cases where the government acted illegally and were taken to task. Today, the governing actor of our virtual public squares are corporations - and a significant amount of people (maybe not you) seem to be ok with them taking what actions they wish.
- chimeracoder 4y ago
  > They remember the dog bites because its cases where the government acted illegally and were taken to task. Uh, no. Society has whitewashed the history of the Civil Rights Movement, but popular sentiment at the time was not with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the other freedom riders, etc. Civilians and the government sometimes acted illegally, sure, but some of those actions were absolutely legal. (Not to mention that the government often leaned on citizens to take illegal vigilante action so that "the government" wouldn't have to - the distinction was not always clear cut). And either way, it's hard to make the argument that they were "taken to task. Even after Brown v. Board, it took over a decade for many local governments (even in the North!) to be forced into compliance. And the actual individuals responsible for the illegal actions rarely faced any serious consequences. EDIT: Clarified the point of legality.
  - uncletaco 4y ago
    The government acted legally. That was (and in a lot of cases still is) the problem. In fact most cities and local governments reserve the right to use hoses and dogs they just don't because it would be bad optics. As the saying goes "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

dhc02 4y ago

One way to look at this is that the natural state of things is that everyone has access to the local public square, and only a few have access to regional or national public squares. The early internet was a perturbation in this natural state, giving millions access to nationaland global distribution of their thoughts for no cost, but natural law is bringing us back to a steady state where you can only reach your friends, colleagues, and neighbors unless you make a career out of journalism, celebrity, big business, or politics.

gwnywg 4y ago

I had felt the same in 2015 when I got banned from Facebook for not providing my real data (they asked me to provide a photo of my ID which I thought and still think was silly). But then I realised how good it was for me (as a user) and started thinking maybe we should aim to go back to the 'small Internet'. By this I mean small forums, maybe chat rooms or something of that sort. I often go back in memories to the late 90's and remember how I felt using the Internet back then. Of course this is nostalgia, but sometimes I wonder if I can build something to get that feeling back.. like island of the 90's internet

ecliptik 4y ago
The "smol Internet" movement is what you're looking for. Returning to smaller online communities using things like Gopher, Gemini, fediverse, pubnixes, etc. https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol-internet https://thedorkweb.substack.com/p/gopher-gemini-and-the-smol...
duncan-donuts 4y ago
I think about this too and know it’s mostly nostalgia too. I’m curious about community organized LANs and running older tech. I also concede that almost no one actually wants to run this shit so it seems very unlikely anyone would want it.

blueberrychpstx 4y ago

> A perfectly pristine public square filled not with people, but consumers staring at advertising boards. Just beautifully written. Do you happen to have a blog?

beebmam 4y ago

> the online world is our current public square That's right, and that's why virtually no one ever gets banned from using the internet. Twitter is not "the online world".

turdit 4y ago
that’s like saying a car is just one method of transportation. so if you get banned from using cars you have no right to complain. but i can tell from your spastic angry (not to mention logically incoherent) post you are a twitter user who’s afraid of their echo chamber changing

jaunkst 4y ago

That's a real issue. It's not just a monopoly in a competitive sense but also a monopoly on 'public squares'. Which is effectively against free speech. When a company or moderator has the power to ban you from a public space your are ostracized by a non-democratic panel, with unknown agendas.

octonion 4y ago

rocket_surgeron 4y ago

It can be solved by realizing that private websites ARE NOT public fora. They have never been, are not now, and will never be. HN has, and will again, removed comments that I have made again, particularly if they stray too far from the party line regarding cryptobros, SEObros, and devs who whore themselves out to ad companies when they could be doing actual real work that benefits humanity while making just a little teeny tiny less money but whores are whores so they'll keep on keeping on. I'm fine with that. And you should be too. If HN was a public square I could tell them to fuck off. Nothing I said would meet any community standards and obscenity triggers in any courtroom in any jurisdiction of any court in all of the United States. "Oh but HN isn't as big as Twit.." is bullshit and has been tried before. Anyone who makes this argument is so intellectually bankrupt they should be banned from the internet for being too stupid to operate an internet browser. You have the same "public square" rights in Times Square that you have in Lotsee Oklahoma (0.02 mi sq), which is smaller than Times Square (0.25 mi sq). Private parties can set arbitrary, capricious, subjective, unfair, and mean rules about what they allow on their platforms, and don't even have to set any rules besides "because we said so". Anything less is tyranny. edit: if public websites are TRUELY public fora, there could be a very strong argument made that hiding my comment due to downvotes is an assault on my rights, similar to covering my sign with a blanket as I try to agitate in ACTUAL, REAL, public squares for civil rights or the legalization of marijuana or the proselytizing of my TIMECUBE religion. Unless, of course there exists "important and real" free speech and "not important" free speech but allowing for that distinction is probably more dangerous than having no free speech at all...

giancarlostoro 4y ago

> This is how big tech does damage to humans. This being whatever AI flagged his post. I would not be surprised. I'm seeing a trend where, Facebook, Discord and I guess now Twitter are trying to use AI to moderate. It is going to backfire hard. Lots of blatantly bad things stay on their platform, but innocent nonsense gets you banned. Either their content moderators are really bad at their job, or silently protesting, or there's an AI involved. In my case someone posted a video featuring a giant spider on Facebook in a little girls hand, it was bigger than her face, my comment was a meme comment you see all over the internet "girl put that spider down we gotta set the house on fire" there's a recurring meme about burning homes to kill spiders due to arachnophobia. Innocent joke, not actually serious, I got a warning, I guess they thought I was actually advocating burning down a home, but I was not. I appealed and immediately not long after I was denied. There's an AI involved, and whoever does appeals is lazy or the AI itself, or has no concept of internet content memes.

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