42 ms·

Censorship by big tech at the behest of the U.S. government?

422 points by dilap 4y ago

zaroth 4y ago
This is a good summary of some of the recent revelations into how far the USG has been pushing into strong-arming online and traditional media outlets alike into suppressing critical speech. I think it’s interesting how the author tip-toed into tying in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, where the FBI lied to Facebook to get it suppressed. It’s a hot potato, but it’s exactly where these efforts lead, from ostensibly “well-meaning and necessary” public health efforts into brazen political coverups.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- isx726552 4y ago
  > the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, where the FBI lied to Facebook to get it suppressed According to this, the FBI didn’t even mention the laptop story when they talked to Facebook: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532.amp
  - pstuart 4y ago
    The Hunter Biden laptop story is as meta as it gets. The whole point of the story is that it's a story, and that bad people aren't letting the story be told. Every freaking complaint about the story is about the story itself. It is Buttery Males v2. Same thing -- they didn't care about the emails, they cared about the story.
    - yeahwhatever10 4y ago
      Yes it turns out people care about being lied to.
      - pstuart 4y ago
        No they don't. They only care when people they don't like lie to them (at least when we're talking about an audience that ostensibly includes you). Selective outrage can only be sincere via ignorance. Tribal/partisan politics such as this is an betrayal of allegiance to one's country.
    - teddyh 4y ago
      Parallels to President Clinton; it didn’t really matter what he actually did, but it turned out to matter very much that he lied about what he did.
      - hedora 4y ago
        OK, if Democrats collectively admit the Biden administration covered up the laptop whatever scandal from 2019 to 2020 can we stop hearing about it? If not, is there an individual opt out browser setting or something?
        pstuart 4y ago
        These people are zombies! "hunter's laptop..... hunter's laptop....." They're literally beyond reason - it's so sad and frustrating.
      - pstuart 4y ago
        Bill Clinton was a sexual predator -- there's a reason why he is not the public statesman he could have been. But for some reason his sexual proclivities were fair game when his predecessor's were not (it was an open secret he had a mistress for decades). But it apparently didn't matter that the other president liked about paying of the porn star he screwed while his wife was in the hospital giving birth to his son. You know, the case where he broke the law but his attorney went to jail for being the bag man? It's crazy-making how selective the "morality" of the right is.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    > "The background here is that the FBI came to us - some folks on our team - and was like 'hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that'." "There's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that" gives a pretty clear hint. The mob boss never says to his hitman "I think Fat Tony is a snitch, please kill him for me" but he still ordered the hit.
    - pstuart 4y ago
      Seriously? Now the FBI is engaging in mob tactics? Is this the branch that operates out of the basement at Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria? You wanna know this one weird trick about this story? It only matters that it exists and can be further weaponized by crying foul over its suppression. You don't care about what the story is about, just the story itself (and the story about the story).
      - fallingknife 4y ago
        > Now the FBI is engaging in mob tactics? Not now. For a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...
        pstuart 4y ago
        But they weren't when they investigated Clinton? There's plenty of sordid history there but your claims are still ludicrous. I dare you to discuss the Hunter Biden case in the context of what it ostensibly represents: government corruption. Your circular logic goes nowhere: the Biden laptop story is about the Biden laptop story not being told. Again: tell me why this story should be told? What is the real substance of your concern?
        fallingknife 4y ago
        What does Clinton have to do with this? And you just don't seem to get it. The garden variety corruption of Hunter Biden isn't the important story. The FBI trying to suppress the spread of news is.
pfisherman 4y ago
The irony is that this is being posted in a heavily moderated forum. The rule of BBS, forums, newsgroups, chat rooms, etc has always been and will always be that quality is proportional to the willingness of the mods to wield that ban hammer. As for the free speech absolutists they are perfectly free to go post whatever nonsense they want on 4chan, 8kun, or Truth Social (heh). The rest of us are free to not go visit those places, and advertisers are free to not run ads there and have their ads associated with content that will tarnish their brand image.
- zaroth 4y ago
  The issue here actually has nothing to do with private moderation. It has to do with the USG lying to platforms that unflattering stories are “Russian disinformation” to get them taken down, or telling platforms they are responsible for killing people for carrying informed scientific debate that goes against the USG approved viewpoint. The platforms did not want to censor these accounts, they even told the owners they would not be. But then the Whitehouse came in and said they needed to do more about these specific people, and Biden went on TV and said socials were killing people by carrying these messages.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  But in this case we're not talking about shutting down trolls - we're talking about excluding political opponents, by actual elected politicians.
  - Covzire 4y ago
    - tohnjitor 4y ago
      Some of us were already apprehensive about going to the doctor before the pandemic.
    - socialismisok 4y ago
      Which intervention did they shut down discussion of, and how many lives would have been saved if the public had heard about it?
dahart 4y ago
- jtbayly 4y ago
  The censorship happened. That's not debatable. The only question is why.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    The question is who censorsed the information and was legal. Why do you think the question is why?
    - jtbayly 4y ago
      We know who. The social media companies did. The question is whether they were doing so at the behest of the government.
      - themitigating 4y ago
        Because of a law congress made? If not then how is it a violation of the 1st amendment?
        adamsb6 4y ago
        Laws are not the only way that government can violate your rights. If a random cop stops by your house and tells you to take down the sign on your lawn, the government has violated your rights. The allegations in the article are of that sort, that government agents were giving direction to private companies on what speech they ought to permit on their platforms.
        themitigating 4y ago
        The first amendment only says congress shall make no law.
zug_zug 4y ago
So one thing really should be cleared up - the 2nd paragraph of this article talks about incorrect criticisms (i.e. misinformation) of an article >> They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain. It then says >> Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks ... were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials The source is a paywalled opinion piece, so I can't get to the bottom of it. In my opinion this claim is serious if true, and entirely bad-faith and undermines the credibility of the article if untrue. There's a huge difference between filtering out or demarcating content believed to be inaccurate or attempting to misinform, versus astroturfing against said articles through false accusations. Which is it, and what's the evidence?
- peteradio 4y ago
  I think the assertion is that both things happened. Accusations of American discussions being wholly Russian fabrications AND backchannel threats against media companies if they didn't fall in line.
- musicale 4y ago
  Was this it? https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-emails-and-some-alleged-science/ https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-emails-and-some-alleged-s...
- Natsu 4y ago
  As near as I can tell they're talking about emails from this set: https://archive.org/details/fauci-emails/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/fauci-emails/page/n3/mode/2up
- blast 4y ago
  It may be not be a huge difference in the context of this case, though, since the plaintiffs' First Amendment argument would apply just as much to the government "filtering out or demarcating content believed to be inaccurate or attempting to misinform".
shadowgovt 4y ago
> All Americans have been deprived—by the United States government—of their First Amendment rights to hear the views of Alex Berenson, as well as Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff... I think this will be hard to prove. The Declaration is easy to find and read (it has its own DNS name). Is there a right to hear a message along a particular channel?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- darawk 4y ago
  There is no right to hear a message from a particular channel, but there is a right not to have the government intervene to suppress that channel. If the private actor decides of their own accord to censor you, that's perfectly legal. If they do so at the behest of government, that is a first amendment issue, and that's what's being asserted here.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    Is it different if it's a government demand vs a government recommendation?
    - jtbayly 4y ago
      It depends on what the consequences are (or are assumed to be) of not acceding to the "recommendation."
      - int_19h 4y ago
        What makes it especially interesting is Facebook's legal troubles in this context. It hasn't occurred to me before, but a monopoly with the threat of anti-trust hanging over it is any government's best friend.
    - darawk 4y ago
      That seems to be what the case will turn on: The difference between the government providing "advice" or "helpful recommendations" and implicit/explicit coercion. I don't know enough about the details here to have a strong opinion of which view is right in this case, but that seems like the central issue.
plaguepilled 4y ago
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Whataboutism from Tablet, the famous soviet magazine.
jtbayly 4y ago
The heart of the issue: > public admissions by then-White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki that the Biden administration was ordering social media companies to censor certain posts, as well as statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening them with regulatory or other legal action if they declined to do so
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  This is what was so infuriating about all the dim-whited "It's a private company, they can do what they want" posts. Let's say for a moment that common carrier doesn't logically apply to Big Tech. The government was involved in 1A abuses if they communicated with these companies to censor posts. End of story. They admitted they did it.
meltyness 4y ago
This article is misleading because the author fails to define "censor." The article repeatedly claims "censorship", where apparently none occurred. If you don't believe me, ask yourself this question: Does this comment itself "censor" the article in any meaningful way?
treeman79 4y ago
A movie was made about the whole laptop scandal. Just before election. It Was quite shocking when I tried messaging links to news articles on Facebook and they were being blocked. Then to find out that FBI asked Facebook to do this. Movie. https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/09/20/13-true-facts-from-the-film-my-son-hunter/amp/ https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/09/20/13-true-f... Facebook admitting. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532.amp
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  "a movie was made" isn't exactly a gotcha or any sort of validation, anyone can make a movie. In this case the "anyone" is Breitbart. If you want an idea of Breitbart's motives... they specifically cast an actress due to her controversial statements, for example. Earlier this year she claimed the war in Ukraine was a fake plot because “they lost control of the COVID narrative.”
  - colpabar 4y ago
  - blast 4y ago
    What does that have to do with allegations of government censorship pressure?
    - themitigating 4y ago
      It goes to the character of Breitbart.
    - micromacrofoot 4y ago
      the movie? it has nothing to do with it - which is why I was responding to the comment about it with “anyone can make a movie” - it proves nothing one way or another and the fact that it was made by breitbart has a whole series of red flags anyway - it was engineered to be controversial
- 4y ago
trasz 4y ago
For background: “The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial.”
superkuh 4y ago
I think regardless of the contents or topic of this write-up the conclusion is easy: stop using corporate social media exclusively (... I say on HN). The key to a healthy web is POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. This doesn't mean just POSSE in isolation though. It means going out of your way to establish/participate in non-corporate controlled communities.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ilaksh 4y ago
To me the core of this issue is that sometimes government officials truly believe their missions are more important than free speech. They may think that their job is actually to suppress free speech unfortunately. Especially common is for national security to override free speech in the minds of government officials. They can easily convince themselves that they need to suppress certain viewpoints in order to save many lives. It just coincidentally also saves their own jobs. I think unfortunately that young people would prefer less free speech and for the government to enforce more confirming perspectives. One other core issue for people who want the tech companies to stop listening to government to consider is the fact that the government has police, guns, prisons, and legal sanctions available to enforce it's policy decisions.
- themitigating 4y ago
  It's possible that national security to be more important than free speech. Doesn't this happen all the time?
  - linuxftw 4y ago
    > It's possible that national security to be more important than free speech. There is no national security without free speech. There might be oligarch security, but not security for the people.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      So troop movements should be public?
      - linuxftw 4y ago
        Definitely. If you're not fighting an unpopular war far overseas somewhere it's not really a problem.
        themitigating 4y ago
darawk 4y ago
The central issue in these cases are the difference between the following two scenarios: 1. The CDC or other government agency says "We believe X is misinformation, do with that advice what you will". 2. The CDC or other government agency says "We believe X is misinformation, and if you don't act on that, we will penalize you in some way". The former is perfectly legitimate, and exactly what e.g. public health agencies ought to be doing: offering opinions and advice to the private sector and public. The latter is a first amendment violation. Presumably, some of these cases will also turn on whether there was an implicit regulatory threat in the "recommendations" given. In some cases, according to this article, the threats seem to have been fairly explicit.
- TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  It seems like #2 is what had happened to Alex Berenson. Kicked off Twitter, sued the U.S. govt and won, and how he's back on Twitter!
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    > Kicked off Twitter, sued the U.S. govt and won, and how he's back on Twitter! Where do you read this stuff? It says "v Twitter" in the title of the lawsuit [1]. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61630076/1/berenson-v-twitter-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61630076/1/berenson-v-t...
    - bgentry 4y ago
      They may have been confused by the fact that Berenson recently announced his intention to sue the US government following the revelations from his Twitter suit, but to my knowledge he hasn’t yet done that. So he sued Twitter and won and was then reinstated on the platform.
      - lesuorac 4y ago
        > So he sued Twitter and won and was then reinstated on the platform. I'm not sure I'd call an out of court settlement a win but to each their own I guess. I'm not too sure he really got what he wanted since the 1st amendment argument was thrown out in court. ---- For those of you who aren't going to bother to read the court document. His strongest point was a "Breach of Contract" which revolved around Twitter directly telling him he wasn't going to get kicked off for what he was posting and then they kicked him off.
BeefWellington 4y ago
My personal take on this is that s.230 protections should not extend to companies using any kind of specialized "algorithm" to dictate what appears in a user's default feed on the website. A feed or timeline view should be simply that: a scrollable list of the most recent visible things from people you have shown a specific interest in (follow/subscribe/whatever), and it should be the default view for the platform. Anyone deviating from that to add their cool special sauce should be excluded from those protections because that's editorializing their content. If they want to have some "explore" section that does the algorithmic magic, sure, but it should be opt-in. Carve out specific rules for users not logged in that can show the basic stuff (e.g.: "most interacted" -- likes and/or comments, "Latest from most subscribed"), perhaps a carve-out by region. Disallow banning people except specifically for extreme ToS violations, harassment, and other criminal activity. Apps must provide robust anti-harassment features (block lists, inability to tag users who have blocked you, those don't show up in search, etc.), reporting mechanisms, etc. If you deviate from these you lose s.230 and are open to being sued the same way newspapers are for their editorial content.
- krapp 4y ago
  https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
  - jimmydorry 4y ago
    What is the point of linking to the law and how it is interpreted as a reply to people that think the law is bad, harmful, or needs updating? Your link makes reference to a similar kind of article about the First Ammendment, which is also bandied about as if it's some kind of rebuttal to people that think platforms are defacto government arms.
    - krapp 4y ago
      The point is to not have to waste time pissing into the wind of constant misinformation and propaganda about both the First Amendment and Section 230, rather than just doing the internet version of tapping at a sign on the wall. taps furiously
deweller 4y ago
It was deeply disturbing to me that throughout the COVID epidemic many highly credentialed doctors and researchers were getting de-platformed for anything that remotely questioned the government's position on anything related to COVID. Science is about asking questions, testing hypotheses and independent research corroboration. There have to be checks and balances. I expect the chilling effect from this experience will remain in the scientific community for a long time.
- _djo_ 4y ago
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    If your response to disagreeing with someone is to censor them, you are not doing science but instead engaging in faith. "Hey, lockdowns may be worse than the disease" is not some evil chain smoking climate skeptic position.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      In isolation that's true. If it's strongly correlated with other assertions like 'it's just a cold', 'only people with unhealthy lifestyles are at risk', 'it's a bioweapon' etc. then people may justifiably suspect it's part of a broad-spectrum attack on public health messaging.
      - nradov 4y ago
        Risk was heavily concentrated among people with unhealthy lifestyles. That doesn't mean we shouldn't take the pandemic seriously, but asserting that fact is in no way an attack on public health messaging. https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-children-in-covid-icus-are-overweight-but-public-health-officials-rarely-talk-about-obesity https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...
        4y ago
kodah 4y ago
I have no opinions on the article itself, but I am interested in whether the same actors also acted in coordination to suppress Lab Leak given that they were also implicated. > Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nation to orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration. I have no idea if Lab Leak theory is still viable, or rather if it can ever be fully proven, but the censorship it got from private entities leads me to believe there was government support involved. Latest on Lab Leak: https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/deconstructed-lab-leak-covid-katherine-eban/ https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/deconstructed-lab-leak-c...
- themitigating 4y ago
  Has it been partially proven? Because I think saying "fully proving" implies there is some proof when there is none
  - kodah 4y ago
    The Intercept does a better job of explaining that. The problem with Lab Leak is that because it was suppressed for so long there's been a lot of time to destroy evidence. At that point the "smoking guns" are pretty few and far between though they mention at least one in that article. There's plenty of evidence in the article, saying that there is none is incorrect. I don't know why you'd be saying that.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      Wouldn't there also be no evidence if it wasn't true?
      - kodah 4y ago
        Did you read the article or are you intentionally asking me questions that The Intercept has already asked notable scientists? Lab Leak theory isn't unfounded, it comes from a fact-based position that already went through numerous layers of questioning because Peter Daszak declared the general question it was trying to answer (eg: Is it possible that gain of function experiments escaped the lab) racist. Even if you don't buy Lab Leak theory the various tidbits about EcoHealth are quite alarming. At a bseline they accepted a DARPA contract to do gain of function research. Is that a way that we want our government functioning? An NGO with very little oversight that does very little oversight taking government money and giving it to institutions in other countries. All of this the Intercept article also talks about. Edit: Based on this users comments I now understand they're not asking questions in good faith. Their profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=themitigating https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=themitigating Other comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=themitigating https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=themitigating
scohesc 4y ago
The only entity that is able to commit acts of violence upon anybody they wish with almost full impunity is not the individual, not these massive silicon valley companies, but your very own government. "Do what we tell you to do or we'll regulate your poo-chute into the dirt." "If you don't agree with a tax we're instituting, too damn bad, you're paying it." "If you disagree with our policy, you can just vote come next election! Your vote has power!" - sure. Very interesting the author pokes at the Hunter Biden laptop debacle. It was shocking to see in real time the information suppressed and hidden from the general public like that. It's obvious that the removal of the content was a political decision just based on the speed it was suppressed by most mainstream media outlets, either encouraged by Twitter's (potential) internal staff bias or from the article-mentioned government agency interference. I'm ignorant regarding Covid because I've never studied in that field in my life. - the virus, the vaccines, the fatality, etc. etc. etc. However, to see other professionals with related credentials under their belt with conflicting opinions shut down and relegated to the "naughty corner" of the internet by their own governments in cahoots with politically-funded thinktank organizations behind "misinformation" or "fact-checker" warnings on social media is abhorrent. The media outlets and talk-show representatives making entire segments to laugh at the "fake scientists", creating musical bits to promote vaccination, it's all very lame and stupid. Reminds me of Copernicus trying to prove the de-facto government (the church) that their teachings were wrong about geocentric model of the solar system - the church did their best to suppress, launch smear campaigns and even threatened with imprisonment for someone's opinion. I swear, some bastardized version of science is being corrupted into the new religion for scared/hopeless people. I wonder - who holds the government accountable for their actions, _really_? I think the answer is nobody - society in general has lost their cohesiveness and ability to collectively "rise up" and express their dissatisfaction, instead choosing to delineate themselves between arbitrary political lines of beliefs that honestly don't have as much of an effect on the individual as they'd like to think. Nobody feels a sense of responsibility for taking care of their nation, because their nation isn't taking care of them. It's treating them as a common cattle - work every day, forced to give up large parts of your income to powerful people you'll never see in your life so they can shuffle the deck of cards and make decisions that will nine times out of ten negatively affect you. It's intentional - the US as a nation is slowly collapsing from this - it's only a matter of time before the US is able to create their "ministry of truth" and have their own "great firewalls" - it won't be rack-mount equipment and direct access to carrier infrastructure like China they'll say - but it'll be through back-room regulation threats and shady hand-shake deals behind smoke and mirrors.
huimang 4y ago
I don't know how letting social media companies dictate political discourse became acceptable. It doesn't matter what your political stance is. Facebook should not be the one saying X is acceptable, Y is not. It's fucking arbitrary, and scary that a private company is telling us what we can talk about. It's not framed as "hey this is our opinion and you can talk about these things elsewhere", it's framed as "this is what's right for society, how could you discuss these other things?". Social media was a mistake.
- Garvi 4y ago
  Also important to realize that social media is the main traffic acquisition point for most news websites. Imagine the economic pressures they are under if they lose that resource even for a short time. No mainstream media outlet can afford that. Example: Imagine Ukraine blows up a bus filled with civilians (war is hell, right?). If your news organization reports on such an unpopular story, high chances are the untrained working-for-free facebook/reddit/social media moderator will flag you for propaganda and you will lose out on days of revenue. So you self censor on sensitive topics. Or perish. Social media moderators are the new gatekeepers of information and that terrifies me.
  - huimang 4y ago
    Then they should perish. We don't need 24/7 news coverage.
  - trasz 4y ago
    >Example: Imagine Ukraine blows up a bus filled with civilians (war is hell, right?). If your organization reports this without any kind of verification - given the common Russian trope of hitting civilians, including civilian buses, and then blaming Ukraine - then it's going to be correctly flagged as propaganda.
    - chakhs 4y ago
      It's very clear the OP implicit assumption is that the report is verified to be true.
bgentry 4y ago
> The question of how the Biden administration has succeeded in jawboning big tech into observing its strictures is not particularly difficult to answer. Tech companies, many of which hold monopoly positions in their markets, have long feared and resisted government regulation. Unquestionably—and as explicitly revealed by the text message exchanged between Murthy and the Twitter executive—the prospect of being held liable for COVID deaths is an alarming one. I don’t think this threat of liability is in large part responsible for tech companies’ increased tendency for censorship. Keep in mind that many of the most egregious COVID era de-platforming events happened during the Trump administration. The primary change that’s responsible is the political shift within these companies, with many workers openly advocating for various forms of censorship and de-platforming. As well as leadership that cannot resist such demands, even when they are from a tiny (but loud) minority of the company.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Both can be true. Your point that internally these companies decided to start censoring, and later the Biden Admin started asking for the same. These is no exclusivity there. If anything, a Trump or Biden Admin might not have had the idea to ask for censorship had the Tech companies not introduced it themselves first?
Mindwipe 4y ago
If anyone involved in this piece had ever mentioned Operation Choke Point during the last fifteen years this might have been better argued.
muaytimbo 4y ago
The government has been shaping public opinion though traditional news media for some time, look at all the "ex" government employees employed as "analysts" at MSCBC, CNN, etc. Since they can't inject talentless talking heads directly into social media's newsfeeds to push their agenda they exert pressure in a different way. It's not surprising at all.
s_ting765 4y ago
Social media apps are, for the most part, a cancer to humanity. This article is just one more proof of it. And the majority of people who, for the most part, demand for more censorship on these public platforms whenever an arbitrary content moderation issue arises... deserve all the propaganda coming their way from these corporate behemoths tag teaming with the government.
nova22033 4y ago
The title ends in a question mark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
- llanowarelves 4y ago
  You could always ask the opposite question as the headline. Does it also mean "no" ?
- curtainsforus 4y ago
  If you read TFA, you'd know that the headline on the link isn't the headline of the article itself, which has no question mark. Presumably the mark was added here to assuage blue-tribe people.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
dekhn 4y ago
I encourage all those who care about this but do not work in medical research to join the government or get a PhD or MD and be prepared to solve the next problem that crops up. Then, you will have some more context on the challenges faced during public health emergencies. In the meantime I'd love to see a truly non-partisan, fact based, recognizing limits of human knowledge postmortem of the US response and how it could have been improved, given the information that was available at the time. The vast majority of postmortems I read of COVID assume knowledge today was avaialble then, that the data is unambiguous, and the conclusions trivially follow from the data, and start with a conclusion, rather than starting with data and forming a collection of hypotheses, and attempting to produce reasonable estimates on the probabilities of those hypotheses. I don't know quite who would be capable of doing this.
- drivebycomment 4y ago
  > In the meantime I'd love to see a truly non-partisan, fact based, recognizing limits of human knowledge postmortem of the US response and how it could have been improved, I share your sentiment, but I won't be holding my breadth. I'm afraid we don't have any existing organizational structure that can produce something like that, and thus I suspect something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report for the pandemic would be necessary, yet it's probably too soon to start one since the pandemic isn't quite "over" enough yet. Even then, we'd need someone like Feynman in the committee, and that's far from guaranteed. That said, no doubt we'll get an endless stream of research studies and books going forward on this topic from multiple angles in the decades ahead.
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  > The vast majority of postmortems I read of COVID assume knowledge today was avaialble then Eh? I remember vividly thinking about a month or so into the first lockdown in the UK that we need to open up now. Sure, we didn't know immediately before we even did anything, but after March/April/May we had very solid statistical data. We have different approaches _even now_. That's not based on a lack of data, it's based on different value systems. Japan, Taiwan, obviously China etc are all still gung-ho on masks (and from what I can tell parts of the US are as well - super weird watching videos of conferences).
notch656a 4y ago
This reminds me of the question: if a jailer asks an inmate to have sex, and they do, has a crime been committed? Perhaps not, but when the government "asks" for something it's hard to interpret it as anything other than "bad things are going to happen to me if I don't." Unlike some tech company, you can't really run away from the government.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure that is already illegal for those specific reasons.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    Which brings me back. Why isn't a practically all-powerful government asking you to abridge otherwise protected speech not considered illegal for the same reason? I've been "asked" by police/regulatory agencies on multiple occasions to do something. Every time I refused I was met with hell, up to including officers lying to a judge to obtain federal search warrant.
deleted 4y ago
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braingenious 4y ago
It’s always funny to see that somebody’s thesis contains the word “wrongthink.” Over the past few years I’ve noticed an strange plethora of people that seemingly act like the only important cultural touchstones that are worthy of referencing are 1984 and Animal Farm. It’s lazy and tired in my opinion (I’m more of a Huxley fan, and I agree with Asimov’s assessment of Orwell [1]) I’m not familiar with Tablet Magazine, but this whole article feels like a very belabored effort to sound highbrow and alarmist about hating the mods. It will never cease to be utterly hilarious how social media has led a whole generation of grown adults to slam up against the phenomenon of “the mods” that those of us that were very active in online communities in the 80s, 90s or early 00s have been familiar with for decades. 1. http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm??
- smt88 4y ago
  > I’m not familiar with Tablet Magazine It's a conservative[1] publication. It is not an unbiased news source. 1. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/tablet-magazine/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/tablet-magazine/
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
drummer 4y ago
hedora 4y ago
Apparently Biden did all this stuff during the 2020 election. The bastard must have a time machine now. Not saying it didn't happen, or isn't concerning; just pointing out that calling the case Missouri vs Biden is a tiny bit... revisionist? Also, the article is needlessly partisan. According to its timeline, thd bad behavior started under Trump and persisted under the Biden administration, but somehow only the Biden administration is being called out.
erichocean 4y ago
I could care less what's "legal" or not in this instance, this isn't the kind of society I want to live in with regard to speech rights—public OR private. The whole system needs to be revised in favor of individuals, not corporations or the government. If that requires new laws or amendments, so be it.
jmull 4y ago
Uh... how can it be OK to organize to communicate an anti-lockdown message, but not OK to organize a rebuttal... by the people tasked with communicating national health policy? Not to mention the large "plot-hole" in the narrative at the start -- I guess the Biden administration was getting an early start in October 2020? Basic reason dies when you join a political tribe.
grb423 4y ago
dang 4y ago
I've replaced the baity headline with somewhat more neutral language from the subtitle, in keeping with the HN guidelines ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"). If someone can suggest a better—more accurate and neutral—title, preferably using a representative phrase from the article text, we can change it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: I also added a question mark since the claim is obviously a divisive one.
- adamsb6 4y ago
  I think the original title, "The U.S. Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime," is more accurate and no more link-baity than yours. The article is about traditional media as well as tech companies and social media.
  - dang 4y ago
    Adding the words 'vast' and 'regime' to the already-divisive word 'censorship' seems pretty baity to me - that's clearly political rhetoric. The current title is a bit, too (that's why I asked for alternatives) but at least it's less so.
    - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
      Dan… you think divisive to call out censorship by its name? Interesting viewpoint coming from a moderator of a news aggregator website with a built in echo chamber mechanism.
      - dang 4y ago
        I'm making a boring empirical observation that people disagree about how to apply that word. You need only look at the current thread for proof of this. If that's not obvious to you, it may be because you happen to agree with one interpretation rather than another; if so, I assure you that other people agree with their interpretation rather than yours. Hence the word "divisive".
6stringmerc 4y ago
I recently got terminated for objecting to a company mass gathering next month where attendees fly in en made, socialize for 24 hours (with a 5k fun run in there) and fly back the next day because it sounds like a body stressing plan and while I’m vaxxed and boosted my underlying health condition could make long COVID really severe. Not a gamble I want to take. The fact I questioned leadership and asserted it was exclusionary to those with health concerns by not having a virtual alternative, well, this is Texas and it would’ve been smarter for them to fire me for no reason. Have an appointment for a legal consult to figure out if name and shame is the next step. As long as UTSW’s update last slide shows R anywhere near 1 I’m going to use caution. I haven’t survived this lifetime disability and flourished by taking medical advice or alternative advice too stringently. There’s quacks in both.
- RichardCNormos 4y ago
  - patchtopic 4y ago
  - BeefWellington 4y ago
    I don't believe the narrative was ever "You will not get COVID if you get these vaccines" given the CDC's own study said it was 90% effective against SARS-COV-2 infections.[1] Omicron and (to a lesser extent) Delta variants changed the game on transmission. They event provided the receipts in April 2021 of a study showing 90% decrease in virus transmission. You can choose to believe this is narrative but it was backed by evidence. The broader question about controlling misinformation is a tricky one and government pressuring social media companies into banning people isn't the ideal situation. However, framing it as people being banned for "Any suggestion to the contrary" is at the best disingenuous. What I saw were people advocating all manner of alternative to the vaccines and spreading disinformation getting banned. A specific instance: Remember all those yarns about how people would now be sterile because of the vaccine? Well, birth rates are now back up to where they were[2] and nobody's shown to have been sterilized because of it. It's one example of just outright misinformation that deserved a ban. This is the "fire in a crowded theatre" debate in different clothes, and it's a hard argument. If you think of this in terms of pure capitalist viewpoint, maybe instead of the government pressuring social media companies the alternative is that drug companies sue Meta et. al (and users) for defamation and libel. I'm not sure how that's a better system and wouldn't lead to the very same thing happening but it's the only alternative that seems immediately obvious. [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm7013e3_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/10/covid-pandemic-caused-birthrate-decline/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/10/covid-pan...
kkoncevicius 4y ago
So according to this article big-tech fears the US government and do as they are told or at least react to cues about what and who should be censored. On the other hand - some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president, while he was still in office, with no such fears. What am I missing?
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Not much. The article's premise is bunk: that private media is required to ignore the underlying truth-value of the US government's positions and re-derive every public policy position for itself. It's also completely in tension with one of the oldest traditions of the executive branch, which is calling up whichever executive(s) you'd like and wailing on them a bit. Can you imagine Tablet writing a similar article about all the companies that the previous administration publicly excoriated for failing to comply with their domestic economic agenda?
  - junofan 4y ago
    I mean, you can skim the emails here [1]. Maybe individual messages are kind of okay, but all together it definitely reads like policing of private speech. The inter-agency communications in particular are pretty bad. [1]: https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-Statement-on-Discovery-Disputes-Combined.pdf https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-State...
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Can you point to the ones you think are particularly bad? I'm looking through the actual emails (starting on page 147), and so far I see: * A public health agency (CDC) receiving media reports ("CrowdTangle content insights") from Facebook. Maybe there's some question about propriety, but that isn't itself evidence of censorship -- the direction there is entirely private-to-public. * Someone at the CDC responding to Facebook, thanking them for sending those media reports (p. 164). * Lots of coordination about who to send the reports to (about 30 pages of just that). * Finally, a lot of not-particularly-objectionable public information about vaccines: that they don't contain microchips, etc. Critically, I can't find any references to the "Great Barrington Declaration" or evidence that the CDC went beyond communicating public health policy to a handful of companies. It's entirely possible that I missed it in this 700 page PDF, so please let me know if you find it.

422 points by dilap 4y ago

This is a good summary of some of the recent revelations into how far the USG has been pushing into strong-arming online and traditional media outlets alike into suppressing critical speech. I think it’s interesting how the author tip-toed into tying in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, where the FBI lied to Facebook to get it suppressed. It’s a hot potato, but it’s exactly where these efforts lead, from ostensibly “well-meaning and necessary” public health efforts into brazen political coverups.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
isx726552 4y ago
> the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, where the FBI lied to Facebook to get it suppressed According to this, the FBI didn’t even mention the laptop story when they talked to Facebook: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532.amp
- pstuart 4y ago
  The Hunter Biden laptop story is as meta as it gets. The whole point of the story is that it's a story, and that bad people aren't letting the story be told. Every freaking complaint about the story is about the story itself. It is Buttery Males v2. Same thing -- they didn't care about the emails, they cared about the story.
  - yeahwhatever10 4y ago
    Yes it turns out people care about being lied to.
    - pstuart 4y ago
      No they don't. They only care when people they don't like lie to them (at least when we're talking about an audience that ostensibly includes you). Selective outrage can only be sincere via ignorance. Tribal/partisan politics such as this is an betrayal of allegiance to one's country.
  - teddyh 4y ago
    Parallels to President Clinton; it didn’t really matter what he actually did, but it turned out to matter very much that he lied about what he did.
    - hedora 4y ago
      OK, if Democrats collectively admit the Biden administration covered up the laptop whatever scandal from 2019 to 2020 can we stop hearing about it? If not, is there an individual opt out browser setting or something?
      - pstuart 4y ago
        These people are zombies! "hunter's laptop..... hunter's laptop....." They're literally beyond reason - it's so sad and frustrating.
    - pstuart 4y ago
      Bill Clinton was a sexual predator -- there's a reason why he is not the public statesman he could have been. But for some reason his sexual proclivities were fair game when his predecessor's were not (it was an open secret he had a mistress for decades). But it apparently didn't matter that the other president liked about paying of the porn star he screwed while his wife was in the hospital giving birth to his son. You know, the case where he broke the law but his attorney went to jail for being the bag man? It's crazy-making how selective the "morality" of the right is.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  > "The background here is that the FBI came to us - some folks on our team - and was like 'hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that'." "There's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that" gives a pretty clear hint. The mob boss never says to his hitman "I think Fat Tony is a snitch, please kill him for me" but he still ordered the hit.
  - pstuart 4y ago
    Seriously? Now the FBI is engaging in mob tactics? Is this the branch that operates out of the basement at Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria? You wanna know this one weird trick about this story? It only matters that it exists and can be further weaponized by crying foul over its suppression. You don't care about what the story is about, just the story itself (and the story about the story).
    - fallingknife 4y ago
      > Now the FBI is engaging in mob tactics? Not now. For a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...
      - pstuart 4y ago
        But they weren't when they investigated Clinton? There's plenty of sordid history there but your claims are still ludicrous. I dare you to discuss the Hunter Biden case in the context of what it ostensibly represents: government corruption. Your circular logic goes nowhere: the Biden laptop story is about the Biden laptop story not being told. Again: tell me why this story should be told? What is the real substance of your concern?
        fallingknife 4y ago
        What does Clinton have to do with this? And you just don't seem to get it. The garden variety corruption of Hunter Biden isn't the important story. The FBI trying to suppress the spread of news is.

pfisherman 4y ago

The irony is that this is being posted in a heavily moderated forum. The rule of BBS, forums, newsgroups, chat rooms, etc has always been and will always be that quality is proportional to the willingness of the mods to wield that ban hammer. As for the free speech absolutists they are perfectly free to go post whatever nonsense they want on 4chan, 8kun, or Truth Social (heh). The rest of us are free to not go visit those places, and advertisers are free to not run ads there and have their ads associated with content that will tarnish their brand image.

zaroth 4y ago
The issue here actually has nothing to do with private moderation. It has to do with the USG lying to platforms that unflattering stories are “Russian disinformation” to get them taken down, or telling platforms they are responsible for killing people for carrying informed scientific debate that goes against the USG approved viewpoint. The platforms did not want to censor these accounts, they even told the owners they would not be. But then the Whitehouse came in and said they needed to do more about these specific people, and Biden went on TV and said socials were killing people by carrying these messages.
commandlinefan 4y ago
But in this case we're not talking about shutting down trolls - we're talking about excluding political opponents, by actual elected politicians.
- Covzire 4y ago
  - tohnjitor 4y ago
    Some of us were already apprehensive about going to the doctor before the pandemic.
  - socialismisok 4y ago
    Which intervention did they shut down discussion of, and how many lives would have been saved if the public had heard about it?

dahart 4y ago

jtbayly 4y ago
The censorship happened. That's not debatable. The only question is why.
- themitigating 4y ago
  The question is who censorsed the information and was legal. Why do you think the question is why?
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    We know who. The social media companies did. The question is whether they were doing so at the behest of the government.
    - themitigating 4y ago
      Because of a law congress made? If not then how is it a violation of the 1st amendment?
      - adamsb6 4y ago
        Laws are not the only way that government can violate your rights. If a random cop stops by your house and tells you to take down the sign on your lawn, the government has violated your rights. The allegations in the article are of that sort, that government agents were giving direction to private companies on what speech they ought to permit on their platforms.
        themitigating 4y ago
        The first amendment only says congress shall make no law.

zug_zug 4y ago

So one thing really should be cleared up - the 2nd paragraph of this article talks about incorrect criticisms (i.e. misinformation) of an article >> They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain. It then says >> Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks ... were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials The source is a paywalled opinion piece, so I can't get to the bottom of it. In my opinion this claim is serious if true, and entirely bad-faith and undermines the credibility of the article if untrue. There's a huge difference between filtering out or demarcating content believed to be inaccurate or attempting to misinform, versus astroturfing against said articles through false accusations. Which is it, and what's the evidence?

peteradio 4y ago
I think the assertion is that both things happened. Accusations of American discussions being wholly Russian fabrications AND backchannel threats against media companies if they didn't fall in line.
musicale 4y ago
Was this it? https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-emails-and-some-alleged-science/ https://www.aier.org/article/fauci-emails-and-some-alleged-s...
Natsu 4y ago
As near as I can tell they're talking about emails from this set: https://archive.org/details/fauci-emails/page/n3/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/fauci-emails/page/n3/mode/2up
blast 4y ago
It may be not be a huge difference in the context of this case, though, since the plaintiffs' First Amendment argument would apply just as much to the government "filtering out or demarcating content believed to be inaccurate or attempting to misinform".

shadowgovt 4y ago

> All Americans have been deprived—by the United States government—of their First Amendment rights to hear the views of Alex Berenson, as well as Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff... I think this will be hard to prove. The Declaration is easy to find and read (it has its own DNS name). Is there a right to hear a message along a particular channel?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
darawk 4y ago
There is no right to hear a message from a particular channel, but there is a right not to have the government intervene to suppress that channel. If the private actor decides of their own accord to censor you, that's perfectly legal. If they do so at the behest of government, that is a first amendment issue, and that's what's being asserted here.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  Is it different if it's a government demand vs a government recommendation?
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    It depends on what the consequences are (or are assumed to be) of not acceding to the "recommendation."
    - int_19h 4y ago
      What makes it especially interesting is Facebook's legal troubles in this context. It hasn't occurred to me before, but a monopoly with the threat of anti-trust hanging over it is any government's best friend.
  - darawk 4y ago
    That seems to be what the case will turn on: The difference between the government providing "advice" or "helpful recommendations" and implicit/explicit coercion. I don't know enough about the details here to have a strong opinion of which view is right in this case, but that seems like the central issue.

plaguepilled 4y ago

pessimizer 4y ago
Whataboutism from Tablet, the famous soviet magazine.

jtbayly 4y ago

The heart of the issue: > public admissions by then-White House press secretary Jennifer Psaki that the Biden administration was ordering social media companies to censor certain posts, as well as statements from Psaki, President Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening them with regulatory or other legal action if they declined to do so

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
This is what was so infuriating about all the dim-whited "It's a private company, they can do what they want" posts. Let's say for a moment that common carrier doesn't logically apply to Big Tech. The government was involved in 1A abuses if they communicated with these companies to censor posts. End of story. They admitted they did it.

meltyness 4y ago

This article is misleading because the author fails to define "censor." The article repeatedly claims "censorship", where apparently none occurred. If you don't believe me, ask yourself this question: Does this comment itself "censor" the article in any meaningful way?

treeman79 4y ago

A movie was made about the whole laptop scandal. Just before election. It Was quite shocking when I tried messaging links to news articles on Facebook and they were being blocked. Then to find out that FBI asked Facebook to do this. Movie. https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/09/20/13-true-facts-from-the-film-my-son-hunter/amp/ https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2022/09/20/13-true-f... Facebook admitting. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532.amp

micromacrofoot 4y ago
"a movie was made" isn't exactly a gotcha or any sort of validation, anyone can make a movie. In this case the "anyone" is Breitbart. If you want an idea of Breitbart's motives... they specifically cast an actress due to her controversial statements, for example. Earlier this year she claimed the war in Ukraine was a fake plot because “they lost control of the COVID narrative.”
- colpabar 4y ago
- blast 4y ago
  What does that have to do with allegations of government censorship pressure?
  - themitigating 4y ago
    It goes to the character of Breitbart.
  - micromacrofoot 4y ago
    the movie? it has nothing to do with it - which is why I was responding to the comment about it with “anyone can make a movie” - it proves nothing one way or another and the fact that it was made by breitbart has a whole series of red flags anyway - it was engineered to be controversial
4y ago

trasz 4y ago

For background: “The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free-market think tank associated with climate change denial.”

superkuh 4y ago

I think regardless of the contents or topic of this write-up the conclusion is easy: stop using corporate social media exclusively (... I say on HN). The key to a healthy web is POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. This doesn't mean just POSSE in isolation though. It means going out of your way to establish/participate in non-corporate controlled communities.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

ilaksh 4y ago

To me the core of this issue is that sometimes government officials truly believe their missions are more important than free speech. They may think that their job is actually to suppress free speech unfortunately. Especially common is for national security to override free speech in the minds of government officials. They can easily convince themselves that they need to suppress certain viewpoints in order to save many lives. It just coincidentally also saves their own jobs. I think unfortunately that young people would prefer less free speech and for the government to enforce more confirming perspectives. One other core issue for people who want the tech companies to stop listening to government to consider is the fact that the government has police, guns, prisons, and legal sanctions available to enforce it's policy decisions.

themitigating 4y ago
It's possible that national security to be more important than free speech. Doesn't this happen all the time?
- linuxftw 4y ago
  > It's possible that national security to be more important than free speech. There is no national security without free speech. There might be oligarch security, but not security for the people.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    So troop movements should be public?
    - linuxftw 4y ago
      Definitely. If you're not fighting an unpopular war far overseas somewhere it's not really a problem.
      - themitigating 4y ago

darawk 4y ago

The central issue in these cases are the difference between the following two scenarios: 1. The CDC or other government agency says "We believe X is misinformation, do with that advice what you will". 2. The CDC or other government agency says "We believe X is misinformation, and if you don't act on that, we will penalize you in some way". The former is perfectly legitimate, and exactly what e.g. public health agencies ought to be doing: offering opinions and advice to the private sector and public. The latter is a first amendment violation. Presumably, some of these cases will also turn on whether there was an implicit regulatory threat in the "recommendations" given. In some cases, according to this article, the threats seem to have been fairly explicit.

TurkishPoptart 4y ago
It seems like #2 is what had happened to Alex Berenson. Kicked off Twitter, sued the U.S. govt and won, and how he's back on Twitter!
- lesuorac 4y ago
  > Kicked off Twitter, sued the U.S. govt and won, and how he's back on Twitter! Where do you read this stuff? It says "v Twitter" in the title of the lawsuit [1]. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61630076/1/berenson-v-twitter-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/61630076/1/berenson-v-t...
  - bgentry 4y ago
    They may have been confused by the fact that Berenson recently announced his intention to sue the US government following the revelations from his Twitter suit, but to my knowledge he hasn’t yet done that. So he sued Twitter and won and was then reinstated on the platform.
    - lesuorac 4y ago
      > So he sued Twitter and won and was then reinstated on the platform. I'm not sure I'd call an out of court settlement a win but to each their own I guess. I'm not too sure he really got what he wanted since the 1st amendment argument was thrown out in court. ---- For those of you who aren't going to bother to read the court document. His strongest point was a "Breach of Contract" which revolved around Twitter directly telling him he wasn't going to get kicked off for what he was posting and then they kicked him off.

BeefWellington 4y ago

My personal take on this is that s.230 protections should not extend to companies using any kind of specialized "algorithm" to dictate what appears in a user's default feed on the website. A feed or timeline view should be simply that: a scrollable list of the most recent visible things from people you have shown a specific interest in (follow/subscribe/whatever), and it should be the default view for the platform. Anyone deviating from that to add their cool special sauce should be excluded from those protections because that's editorializing their content. If they want to have some "explore" section that does the algorithmic magic, sure, but it should be opt-in. Carve out specific rules for users not logged in that can show the basic stuff (e.g.: "most interacted" -- likes and/or comments, "Latest from most subscribed"), perhaps a carve-out by region. Disallow banning people except specifically for extreme ToS violations, harassment, and other criminal activity. Apps must provide robust anti-harassment features (block lists, inability to tag users who have blocked you, those don't show up in search, etc.), reporting mechanisms, etc. If you deviate from these you lose s.230 and are open to being sued the same way newspapers are for their editorial content.

krapp 4y ago
https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
- jimmydorry 4y ago
  What is the point of linking to the law and how it is interpreted as a reply to people that think the law is bad, harmful, or needs updating? Your link makes reference to a similar kind of article about the First Ammendment, which is also bandied about as if it's some kind of rebuttal to people that think platforms are defacto government arms.
  - krapp 4y ago
    The point is to not have to waste time pissing into the wind of constant misinformation and propaganda about both the First Amendment and Section 230, rather than just doing the internet version of tapping at a sign on the wall. taps furiously

deweller 4y ago

It was deeply disturbing to me that throughout the COVID epidemic many highly credentialed doctors and researchers were getting de-platformed for anything that remotely questioned the government's position on anything related to COVID. Science is about asking questions, testing hypotheses and independent research corroboration. There have to be checks and balances. I expect the chilling effect from this experience will remain in the scientific community for a long time.

_djo_ 4y ago
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  If your response to disagreeing with someone is to censor them, you are not doing science but instead engaging in faith. "Hey, lockdowns may be worse than the disease" is not some evil chain smoking climate skeptic position.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    In isolation that's true. If it's strongly correlated with other assertions like 'it's just a cold', 'only people with unhealthy lifestyles are at risk', 'it's a bioweapon' etc. then people may justifiably suspect it's part of a broad-spectrum attack on public health messaging.
    - nradov 4y ago
      Risk was heavily concentrated among people with unhealthy lifestyles. That doesn't mean we shouldn't take the pandemic seriously, but asserting that fact is in no way an attack on public health messaging. https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-children-in-covid-icus-are-overweight-but-public-health-officials-rarely-talk-about-obesity https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...
      - 4y ago

kodah 4y ago

I have no opinions on the article itself, but I am interested in whether the same actors also acted in coordination to suppress Lab Leak given that they were also implicated. > Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nation to orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration. I have no idea if Lab Leak theory is still viable, or rather if it can ever be fully proven, but the censorship it got from private entities leads me to believe there was government support involved. Latest on Lab Leak: https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/deconstructed-lab-leak-covid-katherine-eban/ https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/deconstructed-lab-leak-c...

themitigating 4y ago
Has it been partially proven? Because I think saying "fully proving" implies there is some proof when there is none
- kodah 4y ago
  The Intercept does a better job of explaining that. The problem with Lab Leak is that because it was suppressed for so long there's been a lot of time to destroy evidence. At that point the "smoking guns" are pretty few and far between though they mention at least one in that article. There's plenty of evidence in the article, saying that there is none is incorrect. I don't know why you'd be saying that.
  - themitigating 4y ago
    Wouldn't there also be no evidence if it wasn't true?
    - kodah 4y ago
      Did you read the article or are you intentionally asking me questions that The Intercept has already asked notable scientists? Lab Leak theory isn't unfounded, it comes from a fact-based position that already went through numerous layers of questioning because Peter Daszak declared the general question it was trying to answer (eg: Is it possible that gain of function experiments escaped the lab) racist. Even if you don't buy Lab Leak theory the various tidbits about EcoHealth are quite alarming. At a bseline they accepted a DARPA contract to do gain of function research. Is that a way that we want our government functioning? An NGO with very little oversight that does very little oversight taking government money and giving it to institutions in other countries. All of this the Intercept article also talks about. Edit: Based on this users comments I now understand they're not asking questions in good faith. Their profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=themitigating https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=themitigating Other comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=themitigating https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=themitigating

scohesc 4y ago

The only entity that is able to commit acts of violence upon anybody they wish with almost full impunity is not the individual, not these massive silicon valley companies, but your very own government. "Do what we tell you to do or we'll regulate your poo-chute into the dirt." "If you don't agree with a tax we're instituting, too damn bad, you're paying it." "If you disagree with our policy, you can just vote come next election! Your vote has power!" - sure. Very interesting the author pokes at the Hunter Biden laptop debacle. It was shocking to see in real time the information suppressed and hidden from the general public like that. It's obvious that the removal of the content was a political decision just based on the speed it was suppressed by most mainstream media outlets, either encouraged by Twitter's (potential) internal staff bias or from the article-mentioned government agency interference. I'm ignorant regarding Covid because I've never studied in that field in my life. - the virus, the vaccines, the fatality, etc. etc. etc. However, to see other professionals with related credentials under their belt with conflicting opinions shut down and relegated to the "naughty corner" of the internet by their own governments in cahoots with politically-funded thinktank organizations behind "misinformation" or "fact-checker" warnings on social media is abhorrent. The media outlets and talk-show representatives making entire segments to laugh at the "fake scientists", creating musical bits to promote vaccination, it's all very lame and stupid. Reminds me of Copernicus trying to prove the de-facto government (the church) that their teachings were wrong about geocentric model of the solar system - the church did their best to suppress, launch smear campaigns and even threatened with imprisonment for someone's opinion. I swear, some bastardized version of science is being corrupted into the new religion for scared/hopeless people. I wonder - who holds the government accountable for their actions, _really_? I think the answer is nobody - society in general has lost their cohesiveness and ability to collectively "rise up" and express their dissatisfaction, instead choosing to delineate themselves between arbitrary political lines of beliefs that honestly don't have as much of an effect on the individual as they'd like to think. Nobody feels a sense of responsibility for taking care of their nation, because their nation isn't taking care of them. It's treating them as a common cattle - work every day, forced to give up large parts of your income to powerful people you'll never see in your life so they can shuffle the deck of cards and make decisions that will nine times out of ten negatively affect you. It's intentional - the US as a nation is slowly collapsing from this - it's only a matter of time before the US is able to create their "ministry of truth" and have their own "great firewalls" - it won't be rack-mount equipment and direct access to carrier infrastructure like China they'll say - but it'll be through back-room regulation threats and shady hand-shake deals behind smoke and mirrors.

huimang 4y ago

I don't know how letting social media companies dictate political discourse became acceptable. It doesn't matter what your political stance is. Facebook should not be the one saying X is acceptable, Y is not. It's fucking arbitrary, and scary that a private company is telling us what we can talk about. It's not framed as "hey this is our opinion and you can talk about these things elsewhere", it's framed as "this is what's right for society, how could you discuss these other things?". Social media was a mistake.

Garvi 4y ago
Also important to realize that social media is the main traffic acquisition point for most news websites. Imagine the economic pressures they are under if they lose that resource even for a short time. No mainstream media outlet can afford that. Example: Imagine Ukraine blows up a bus filled with civilians (war is hell, right?). If your news organization reports on such an unpopular story, high chances are the untrained working-for-free facebook/reddit/social media moderator will flag you for propaganda and you will lose out on days of revenue. So you self censor on sensitive topics. Or perish. Social media moderators are the new gatekeepers of information and that terrifies me.
- huimang 4y ago
  Then they should perish. We don't need 24/7 news coverage.
- trasz 4y ago
  >Example: Imagine Ukraine blows up a bus filled with civilians (war is hell, right?). If your organization reports this without any kind of verification - given the common Russian trope of hitting civilians, including civilian buses, and then blaming Ukraine - then it's going to be correctly flagged as propaganda.
  - chakhs 4y ago
    It's very clear the OP implicit assumption is that the report is verified to be true.

bgentry 4y ago

> The question of how the Biden administration has succeeded in jawboning big tech into observing its strictures is not particularly difficult to answer. Tech companies, many of which hold monopoly positions in their markets, have long feared and resisted government regulation. Unquestionably—and as explicitly revealed by the text message exchanged between Murthy and the Twitter executive—the prospect of being held liable for COVID deaths is an alarming one. I don’t think this threat of liability is in large part responsible for tech companies’ increased tendency for censorship. Keep in mind that many of the most egregious COVID era de-platforming events happened during the Trump administration. The primary change that’s responsible is the political shift within these companies, with many workers openly advocating for various forms of censorship and de-platforming. As well as leadership that cannot resist such demands, even when they are from a tiny (but loud) minority of the company.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
Both can be true. Your point that internally these companies decided to start censoring, and later the Biden Admin started asking for the same. These is no exclusivity there. If anything, a Trump or Biden Admin might not have had the idea to ask for censorship had the Tech companies not introduced it themselves first?

Mindwipe 4y ago

If anyone involved in this piece had ever mentioned Operation Choke Point during the last fifteen years this might have been better argued.

muaytimbo 4y ago

The government has been shaping public opinion though traditional news media for some time, look at all the "ex" government employees employed as "analysts" at MSCBC, CNN, etc. Since they can't inject talentless talking heads directly into social media's newsfeeds to push their agenda they exert pressure in a different way. It's not surprising at all.

s_ting765 4y ago

Social media apps are, for the most part, a cancer to humanity. This article is just one more proof of it. And the majority of people who, for the most part, demand for more censorship on these public platforms whenever an arbitrary content moderation issue arises... deserve all the propaganda coming their way from these corporate behemoths tag teaming with the government.

nova22033 4y ago

The title ends in a question mark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

llanowarelves 4y ago
You could always ask the opposite question as the headline. Does it also mean "no" ?
curtainsforus 4y ago
If you read TFA, you'd know that the headline on the link isn't the headline of the article itself, which has no question mark. Presumably the mark was added here to assuage blue-tribe people.
deleted 4y ago
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dekhn 4y ago

I encourage all those who care about this but do not work in medical research to join the government or get a PhD or MD and be prepared to solve the next problem that crops up. Then, you will have some more context on the challenges faced during public health emergencies. In the meantime I'd love to see a truly non-partisan, fact based, recognizing limits of human knowledge postmortem of the US response and how it could have been improved, given the information that was available at the time. The vast majority of postmortems I read of COVID assume knowledge today was avaialble then, that the data is unambiguous, and the conclusions trivially follow from the data, and start with a conclusion, rather than starting with data and forming a collection of hypotheses, and attempting to produce reasonable estimates on the probabilities of those hypotheses. I don't know quite who would be capable of doing this.

drivebycomment 4y ago
> In the meantime I'd love to see a truly non-partisan, fact based, recognizing limits of human knowledge postmortem of the US response and how it could have been improved, I share your sentiment, but I won't be holding my breadth. I'm afraid we don't have any existing organizational structure that can produce something like that, and thus I suspect something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission_Report for the pandemic would be necessary, yet it's probably too soon to start one since the pandemic isn't quite "over" enough yet. Even then, we'd need someone like Feynman in the committee, and that's far from guaranteed. That said, no doubt we'll get an endless stream of research studies and books going forward on this topic from multiple angles in the decades ahead.
throwaway22032 4y ago
> The vast majority of postmortems I read of COVID assume knowledge today was avaialble then Eh? I remember vividly thinking about a month or so into the first lockdown in the UK that we need to open up now. Sure, we didn't know immediately before we even did anything, but after March/April/May we had very solid statistical data. We have different approaches _even now_. That's not based on a lack of data, it's based on different value systems. Japan, Taiwan, obviously China etc are all still gung-ho on masks (and from what I can tell parts of the US are as well - super weird watching videos of conferences).

notch656a 4y ago

This reminds me of the question: if a jailer asks an inmate to have sex, and they do, has a crime been committed? Perhaps not, but when the government "asks" for something it's hard to interpret it as anything other than "bad things are going to happen to me if I don't." Unlike some tech company, you can't really run away from the government.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
I'm pretty sure that is already illegal for those specific reasons.
- notch656a 4y ago
  Which brings me back. Why isn't a practically all-powerful government asking you to abridge otherwise protected speech not considered illegal for the same reason? I've been "asked" by police/regulatory agencies on multiple occasions to do something. Every time I refused I was met with hell, up to including officers lying to a judge to obtain federal search warrant.

deleted 4y ago

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braingenious 4y ago

It’s always funny to see that somebody’s thesis contains the word “wrongthink.” Over the past few years I’ve noticed an strange plethora of people that seemingly act like the only important cultural touchstones that are worthy of referencing are 1984 and Animal Farm. It’s lazy and tired in my opinion (I’m more of a Huxley fan, and I agree with Asimov’s assessment of Orwell [1]) I’m not familiar with Tablet Magazine, but this whole article feels like a very belabored effort to sound highbrow and alarmist about hating the mods. It will never cease to be utterly hilarious how social media has led a whole generation of grown adults to slam up against the phenomenon of “the mods” that those of us that were very active in online communities in the 80s, 90s or early 00s have been familiar with for decades. 1. http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm??

smt88 4y ago
> I’m not familiar with Tablet Magazine It's a conservative[1] publication. It is not an unbiased news source. 1. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/tablet-magazine/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/tablet-magazine/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

drummer 4y ago

hedora 4y ago

Apparently Biden did all this stuff during the 2020 election. The bastard must have a time machine now. Not saying it didn't happen, or isn't concerning; just pointing out that calling the case Missouri vs Biden is a tiny bit... revisionist? Also, the article is needlessly partisan. According to its timeline, thd bad behavior started under Trump and persisted under the Biden administration, but somehow only the Biden administration is being called out.

erichocean 4y ago

I could care less what's "legal" or not in this instance, this isn't the kind of society I want to live in with regard to speech rights—public OR private. The whole system needs to be revised in favor of individuals, not corporations or the government. If that requires new laws or amendments, so be it.

jmull 4y ago

Uh... how can it be OK to organize to communicate an anti-lockdown message, but not OK to organize a rebuttal... by the people tasked with communicating national health policy? Not to mention the large "plot-hole" in the narrative at the start -- I guess the Biden administration was getting an early start in October 2020? Basic reason dies when you join a political tribe.

grb423 4y ago

dang 4y ago

I've replaced the baity headline with somewhat more neutral language from the subtitle, in keeping with the HN guidelines ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait"). If someone can suggest a better—more accurate and neutral—title, preferably using a representative phrase from the article text, we can change it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: I also added a question mark since the claim is obviously a divisive one.

adamsb6 4y ago
I think the original title, "The U.S. Government’s Vast New Privatized Censorship Regime," is more accurate and no more link-baity than yours. The article is about traditional media as well as tech companies and social media.
- dang 4y ago
  Adding the words 'vast' and 'regime' to the already-divisive word 'censorship' seems pretty baity to me - that's clearly political rhetoric. The current title is a bit, too (that's why I asked for alternatives) but at least it's less so.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Dan… you think divisive to call out censorship by its name? Interesting viewpoint coming from a moderator of a news aggregator website with a built in echo chamber mechanism.
    - dang 4y ago
      I'm making a boring empirical observation that people disagree about how to apply that word. You need only look at the current thread for proof of this. If that's not obvious to you, it may be because you happen to agree with one interpretation rather than another; if so, I assure you that other people agree with their interpretation rather than yours. Hence the word "divisive".

6stringmerc 4y ago

I recently got terminated for objecting to a company mass gathering next month where attendees fly in en made, socialize for 24 hours (with a 5k fun run in there) and fly back the next day because it sounds like a body stressing plan and while I’m vaxxed and boosted my underlying health condition could make long COVID really severe. Not a gamble I want to take. The fact I questioned leadership and asserted it was exclusionary to those with health concerns by not having a virtual alternative, well, this is Texas and it would’ve been smarter for them to fire me for no reason. Have an appointment for a legal consult to figure out if name and shame is the next step. As long as UTSW’s update last slide shows R anywhere near 1 I’m going to use caution. I haven’t survived this lifetime disability and flourished by taking medical advice or alternative advice too stringently. There’s quacks in both.

RichardCNormos 4y ago
- patchtopic 4y ago
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  I don't believe the narrative was ever "You will not get COVID if you get these vaccines" given the CDC's own study said it was 90% effective against SARS-COV-2 infections.[1] Omicron and (to a lesser extent) Delta variants changed the game on transmission. They event provided the receipts in April 2021 of a study showing 90% decrease in virus transmission. You can choose to believe this is narrative but it was backed by evidence. The broader question about controlling misinformation is a tricky one and government pressuring social media companies into banning people isn't the ideal situation. However, framing it as people being banned for "Any suggestion to the contrary" is at the best disingenuous. What I saw were people advocating all manner of alternative to the vaccines and spreading disinformation getting banned. A specific instance: Remember all those yarns about how people would now be sterile because of the vaccine? Well, birth rates are now back up to where they were[2] and nobody's shown to have been sterilized because of it. It's one example of just outright misinformation that deserved a ban. This is the "fire in a crowded theatre" debate in different clothes, and it's a hard argument. If you think of this in terms of pure capitalist viewpoint, maybe instead of the government pressuring social media companies the alternative is that drug companies sue Meta et. al (and users) for defamation and libel. I'm not sure how that's a better system and wouldn't lead to the very same thing happening but it's the only alternative that seems immediately obvious. [1]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm7013e3_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/10/covid-pandemic-caused-birthrate-decline/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/10/covid-pan...

kkoncevicius 4y ago

So according to this article big-tech fears the US government and do as they are told or at least react to cues about what and who should be censored. On the other hand - some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president, while he was still in office, with no such fears. What am I missing?

woodruffw 4y ago
Not much. The article's premise is bunk: that private media is required to ignore the underlying truth-value of the US government's positions and re-derive every public policy position for itself. It's also completely in tension with one of the oldest traditions of the executive branch, which is calling up whichever executive(s) you'd like and wailing on them a bit. Can you imagine Tablet writing a similar article about all the companies that the previous administration publicly excoriated for failing to comply with their domestic economic agenda?
- junofan 4y ago
  I mean, you can skim the emails here [1]. Maybe individual messages are kind of okay, but all together it definitely reads like policing of private speech. The inter-agency communications in particular are pretty bad. [1]: https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-Statement-on-Discovery-Disputes-Combined.pdf https://nclalegal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Joint-State...
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Can you point to the ones you think are particularly bad? I'm looking through the actual emails (starting on page 147), and so far I see: * A public health agency (CDC) receiving media reports ("CrowdTangle content insights") from Facebook. Maybe there's some question about propriety, but that isn't itself evidence of censorship -- the direction there is entirely private-to-public. * Someone at the CDC responding to Facebook, thanking them for sending those media reports (p. 164). * Lots of coordination about who to send the reports to (about 30 pages of just that). * Finally, a lot of not-particularly-objectionable public information about vaccines: that they don't contain microchips, etc. Critically, I can't find any references to the "Great Barrington Declaration" or evidence that the CDC went beyond communicating public health policy to a handful of companies. It's entirely possible that I missed it in this 700 page PDF, so please let me know if you find it.