4 ms·
> Some middlemen like Twitter or Facebook does not want to be associated with certain images or point of view, perhaps because of advertising or user demogr
by nonrandomstring 4y ago
> Some middlemen like Twitter or Facebook does not want to be
associated with certain images or point of view, perhaps because of
advertising or user demographics
And that's the precise point at which they cease to be a "middleman"
and become a publisher.
- kmonsen 4y agoThat’s maybe true but also outside the point of the article. I was actually thinking of another case, the Hunter Biden laptop. All major news publishers decided not to report on it just before the election even though the story was obviously true and newsworthy. This was actually done by publishers, but still the important point here is that a story did not reach audiences even though maybe at least some of them wanted to see it and some people wanted to tell it like journalists in nytimes. The blockade was so effective that I thought it was a hoax until recently.
- notahacker 4y agoApparently you've actually published work yourself? Did your publisher print, bind and release every single word submitted to it without any human intervention at all, and then ad hoc remove a small proportion of the content after objections and bar a small proportion of users from further submissions? If not, why are you pretending that two completely different processes are the same? Nobody argues that owners of physical premises should choose between accepting full responsibility for every action on their premises or being utterly powerless to eject any person for any reason.
- nailer 4y agoHi, I’m a published author and I can assure you my publisher did not attempt to change opinions or other ideas, whether subjective or objective, in the resulting work. Rather they were concerned with brevity and storytelling.
- notahacker 4y agoSo there was an actual editorial process before publication, not publication of everything submitted to it by default and subsequent ad-hoc removal of a few things that most offended its customers? I'll take your word for it that none of your opinions or ideas were controversial enough to upset your publisher, but do you feel the editorial process would have been completely uninterested in removing opinions or other ideas before publication if your draft contained frequent asides praising the Third Reich or suggesting that the practice of software development would be greatly improved by only allowing men to participate in it?
- nailer 4y ago> if your draft contained frequent asides praising the Third Reich Do you think that’s what we’re discussing here? Fascinating.
- notahacker 4y agoWell, assuming we're still discussing the issue of whether removing a subset of user-generated content makes website owners publishers, then I think it's quite reasonable to ask whether your publisher would remain solely concerned with brevity and style if they received submissions incorporating the same range of opinions and ideas as social media.
- nailer 4y agook. I’m invoking Godwin’s law though so won’t be participating.
- notahacker 4y agoThe tendency of open internet discussion to inexorably tend towards talking about Nazis (and the Godwin corollary that when open internet discussion reaches Twitter-scale, it inevitably attracts participants wanting to defend the Nazis) was the point. Publishers don't have to deal with that bullshit, which is one of the reasons why publishing isn't remotely similar to forum moderation. If they did, they'd be a lot more censorious on the ideas and opinions side.