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"innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law. Similar to when people cite the 1st amendment in situations where a private company is taking act

"innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law. Similar to when people cite the 1st amendment in situations where a private company is taking action, this phrase is meaningless here. A private company can do what it wants within the bounds of the law.

Nextgrid 3y ago
Maybe this should be reconsidered when a "private company" controls a large majority of humanity's social fabric and/or popular culture?
- klyrs 3y ago
  No, antitrust laws should break them up.
- nova22033 3y ago
  The way to reconsider this is to amend the constitution.
- miohtama 3y ago
  This is why developer and hacker community should strive to build open networks, and then have them adopted. This was what early internet was like: Usenet, IRC, etc.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    Usenet was a set of fiefdoms mostly administered by academics in CompSci departments, and proved utterly unequal to its first real crisis*. Distributed systems work great as long as they're new and everyone is participating in good faith most of the time. In adversarial situations, they're rarely able to adapt flexibly enough, partly because the networked structure imposes a severe decision-time penalty on consensus formation. A negligent or malicious attacker just has to overwhelm nodes with high betweenness centrality and the whole network fails. Immediately following crises everyone talks about making the network more resilient and so on, but it never fully recovers because everyone intuitively knows that establishing consus is slow and bumpy, and that major restructuring/retooling efforts are way easier to accomplish unilaterally. So people start drifting away because unless there's a quick technical fix that can be deployed within a month or two, It's Over. Distributed systems always lose against coherent attackers with more than a threshold level of resources because the latter has a much tighter OODA loop. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel#Green_card_spam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
  - tored 3y ago
    Yes, but I would also add that it is important that the rest of the world should stop using services from American companies.
  - corinroyal 3y ago
    Exactly, and look what happened to Usenet. People abused the commons and we lost it to spam. Unmoderated networks always fall to bad actors. I'm building a p2p social network and struggling hard with how to balance company needs, community needs, and individual freedom. A free-for-all leads to a tyranny of structurelessness in which the loudest and pushiest form a defacto leadership that doesn't represent the will of the majority. On the flip side, overly restrictive rules stifle expression and cause resentment. These are hard questions and there is no one answer, except that unmoderated networks always suck eventually, so the question is one of line drawing and compromise.
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  How do you propose this actually work out? Every time youtube, twitter, facebook, etc wants to ban someone they have to submit a request to the government or be subject to its oversight? That's far more dystopian.
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    Aren't they still publishing his content, just not running ads and paying? The US government will do fuckall about that, even if platforms are forced to be quasi-national entities subject to the First Amendment.
  - kypro 3y ago
    Or alternatively companies have to provide clear and explicit rules about what is permissible on their platform and if you feel you're wrongly censored or removed from the platform you should be able to take legal action. I'm fine with YouTube not wanting to provide a platform for people who they feel are harmful, but they need to define that in an explicit way so that these decisions are not made arbitrarily. I believe primary Brand's job for the last few years has been as a content creator. Given this I think it's reasonable to expect he should have some legal rights. Personally I don't see a huge amount of difference between an Uber gig worker and a YouTube content creator. Both should have some basic rights regardless of whether they're technically classed as "employees".
    - jayrot 3y ago
      They do have rules on what is permissible on their platform. They call it the Creator Responsibility Policy. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7650329?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7650329?hl=en
      - kypro 3y ago
        If by "rules" you mean vague references to "harm" then sure. My use of the word "explicit" here was intentional. As it stands the "rules" may as well just read "if we don't like what you're doing on or off our platform we reserve the right fire you as a content creator". And again I'll note, if you're fired as a content creator for some arbitrary reason you have no way to challenge the decision. I don't think this is acceptable. I think Google should ultimately be able to run their platform however they like, but they have a responsibility to make those rules clear when people are dependant on them for their income.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  You are reconsidering the wrong part. Let's have smaller companies that aren't able to control that much of society.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
efitz 3y ago
Then let’s change the law. It’s obvious over the past few years that companies can’t be trusted with freedom of association or freedom of speech. Let’s strip them of both. If you are incorporated (and therefore benefit from government-provided protection from liability and lower tax rates) then you no longer get to choose your customers; you’re a common carrier and must provide the same service to all customers. You can only terminate a customer for non-payment (if you’re a paid service) or if the customer takes actions that directly threaten your business (eg attempts to hack your service). Social media companies may no longer promote or suppress content; they can only provide tools to let users do so themselves (eg filter/block/subscribe/tag). Advertisers can use similar filters for ad placement.
- threeseed 3y ago
  You need to understand that the majority of people simply don't agree with you. They choose platforms with moderation (aka censorship) and stay away from those that don't.
  - flextheruler 3y ago
    In the beginning YouTube was popular and had very little moderation. You could watch illegal streams of many films and movies and you could find some porn before it’d be taken down. Advertisers are what demand moderation not users so as to protect their bottom line. It’s disingenuous to say otherwise and ignores a multitude of services that became and still are incredible popular with little moderation.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      'Them that has the gold makes the rules'. The users are not the paying customers.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      > ignores a multitude of services that became and still are incredible popular with little moderation Please provide examples. So we can compare them to the likes of Meta, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Reddit etc.
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
> "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a philosophical concept that many legal systems subscribe to in the context of criminal law. > Similar to when people cite the 1st amendment in situations where a private company is taking action Indeed, it’s very similar in the sense that the concept of the freedom of speech goes way beyond the 1st amendment. It existed before it. And it is the first amendment that exists because of the freedom of speech, not the other way round. > A private company can do what it wants within the bounds of the law. Yeah, including immoral actions that others may disagree with.
- runarberg 3y ago
  > Yeah, including immoral actions that others may disagree with. The morality in this instance does not follow this principle. If people find these allegations credible—and most should—the morally correct action is to deplatform him and delete his content.
  - indoclay 3y ago
    > If people find these allegations credible—and most should Why should most people find these allegations credible? I do not believe there is a police report, arrest, and let alone a trial. These are currently just allegations, their credibility has not been adjudicated.
    - Airsinner 3y ago
      One might evaluate the situation based on what I think is called a "preponderance of evidence", combined with an understanding that the legal system is both slow and tends towards innocence unless a crime is proven "beyond a shadow of a doubt". A person may know how slow and different a legal decision is compared to what may be obvious and a reflection of reality, and therefore might arrive at a conclusion well before a system designed to be conclusive would. The law is more about what can be proven than it is about what is true, and for people who know that, legal judgement stands separately from moral evaluation.
afiori 3y ago
"innocent until proven guilty" and "freedom of speech" are principles codified in law. The position that only the government is bound by "freedom of speech" is, at the very least, weird in an international context where things that are not the US government are expected to respect people's freedoms. It is also perfectly legal to do a lot bad things like e.g. buying the product of slave labor in other countries or blood diamonds or buying stocks of companies known to pollute with wild disregard. Also in the US: > "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law. is misleading, the more precise version is that "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in criminal courts.
tored 3y ago
Sure, but the public can always remove all legal benefits a private stockholder company has, like liability.
bsndiieee665262 3y ago
[flagged]
zo1 3y ago
It's a principle we hold as a society.
epgui 3y ago
> "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law No, it doesn't "only" apply in a court of law. I choose to apply it in my own psyche (which breaks the "only"), and I choose to do so because I understand the reasons why a court of law applies the principle. Just because the whole village is wielding pitchforks doesn't mean it's rational for you to also do the same.
- turquoisevar 3y ago
  They used a turn of phrase of which the full meaning was implied. That meaning being “the concept of innocent until proven guilty is only universally applicable in a court of law”. So unless your psyche has any force beyond itself or it happens to be a court of law, your gotcha lacks any meaningful effect. Beyond you grandstanding that is.
  - epgui 3y ago
    - It’s not meant to be a “gotcha” - It’s not about enforcing anything on anyone, I think you’re missing the point - Thank you for your contribution
  - johnnyworker 3y ago
    They used it in the context of the question whether "we, the internet" have done away with it. So clearly it never referred to the legal system, and diverting to that is just kicking up sand to not let the people who are interested discussing the question as it was asked discuss it in peace.
orblivion 3y ago
It doesn't have to apply everywhere but it's still a good policy in a lot of contexts. I think a massive general audience platform is a good example. If this were, let's say, an online community of survivors of abuse, maybe that sort of prudence could reasonably take a back seat.
globular-toast 3y ago
This is such a common thing for people to say I have to wonder if it's propaganda from big corporations. The idea that core tenets of our civilisation are invalid because "it's a private company" is insane. These principles are based on practicalities, not technicalities.
Plasmoid 3y ago
There's this really neat section of law known as administrative law. One of the tenants is that you are allowed to have pretty much any rule that you want to have but you have to apply it in a reasonably impartial and fair manner. This means, you can setup random rules that you enforce capriciously.
turquoisevar 3y ago
Even then it’s a rather unfortunately named legal principle. It would’ve been better for it to be called “not-guilty until proven guilty” since criminal courts aren’t in the business of establishing innocence nor do they have the power to declare someone innocent. But I guess that doesn’t roll as nicely off the tongue.

Nextgrid 3y ago

Maybe this should be reconsidered when a "private company" controls a large majority of humanity's social fabric and/or popular culture?

klyrs 3y ago
No, antitrust laws should break them up.
nova22033 3y ago
The way to reconsider this is to amend the constitution.
miohtama 3y ago
This is why developer and hacker community should strive to build open networks, and then have them adopted. This was what early internet was like: Usenet, IRC, etc.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Usenet was a set of fiefdoms mostly administered by academics in CompSci departments, and proved utterly unequal to its first real crisis*. Distributed systems work great as long as they're new and everyone is participating in good faith most of the time. In adversarial situations, they're rarely able to adapt flexibly enough, partly because the networked structure imposes a severe decision-time penalty on consensus formation. A negligent or malicious attacker just has to overwhelm nodes with high betweenness centrality and the whole network fails. Immediately following crises everyone talks about making the network more resilient and so on, but it never fully recovers because everyone intuitively knows that establishing consus is slow and bumpy, and that major restructuring/retooling efforts are way easier to accomplish unilaterally. So people start drifting away because unless there's a quick technical fix that can be deployed within a month or two, It's Over. Distributed systems always lose against coherent attackers with more than a threshold level of resources because the latter has a much tighter OODA loop. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel#Green_card_spam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
- tored 3y ago
  Yes, but I would also add that it is important that the rest of the world should stop using services from American companies.
- corinroyal 3y ago
  Exactly, and look what happened to Usenet. People abused the commons and we lost it to spam. Unmoderated networks always fall to bad actors. I'm building a p2p social network and struggling hard with how to balance company needs, community needs, and individual freedom. A free-for-all leads to a tyranny of structurelessness in which the loudest and pushiest form a defacto leadership that doesn't represent the will of the majority. On the flip side, overly restrictive rules stifle expression and cause resentment. These are hard questions and there is no one answer, except that unmoderated networks always suck eventually, so the question is one of line drawing and compromise.
JohnMakin 3y ago
How do you propose this actually work out? Every time youtube, twitter, facebook, etc wants to ban someone they have to submit a request to the government or be subject to its oversight? That's far more dystopian.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  Aren't they still publishing his content, just not running ads and paying? The US government will do fuckall about that, even if platforms are forced to be quasi-national entities subject to the First Amendment.
- kypro 3y ago
  Or alternatively companies have to provide clear and explicit rules about what is permissible on their platform and if you feel you're wrongly censored or removed from the platform you should be able to take legal action. I'm fine with YouTube not wanting to provide a platform for people who they feel are harmful, but they need to define that in an explicit way so that these decisions are not made arbitrarily. I believe primary Brand's job for the last few years has been as a content creator. Given this I think it's reasonable to expect he should have some legal rights. Personally I don't see a huge amount of difference between an Uber gig worker and a YouTube content creator. Both should have some basic rights regardless of whether they're technically classed as "employees".
  - jayrot 3y ago
    They do have rules on what is permissible on their platform. They call it the Creator Responsibility Policy. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7650329?hl=en https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7650329?hl=en
    - kypro 3y ago
      If by "rules" you mean vague references to "harm" then sure. My use of the word "explicit" here was intentional. As it stands the "rules" may as well just read "if we don't like what you're doing on or off our platform we reserve the right fire you as a content creator". And again I'll note, if you're fired as a content creator for some arbitrary reason you have no way to challenge the decision. I don't think this is acceptable. I think Google should ultimately be able to run their platform however they like, but they have a responsibility to make those rules clear when people are dependant on them for their income.
plagiarist 3y ago
You are reconsidering the wrong part. Let's have smaller companies that aren't able to control that much of society.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

efitz 3y ago

Then let’s change the law. It’s obvious over the past few years that companies can’t be trusted with freedom of association or freedom of speech. Let’s strip them of both. If you are incorporated (and therefore benefit from government-provided protection from liability and lower tax rates) then you no longer get to choose your customers; you’re a common carrier and must provide the same service to all customers. You can only terminate a customer for non-payment (if you’re a paid service) or if the customer takes actions that directly threaten your business (eg attempts to hack your service). Social media companies may no longer promote or suppress content; they can only provide tools to let users do so themselves (eg filter/block/subscribe/tag). Advertisers can use similar filters for ad placement.

threeseed 3y ago
You need to understand that the majority of people simply don't agree with you. They choose platforms with moderation (aka censorship) and stay away from those that don't.
- flextheruler 3y ago
  In the beginning YouTube was popular and had very little moderation. You could watch illegal streams of many films and movies and you could find some porn before it’d be taken down. Advertisers are what demand moderation not users so as to protect their bottom line. It’s disingenuous to say otherwise and ignores a multitude of services that became and still are incredible popular with little moderation.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    'Them that has the gold makes the rules'. The users are not the paying customers.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    > ignores a multitude of services that became and still are incredible popular with little moderation Please provide examples. So we can compare them to the likes of Meta, Netflix, Spotify, Apple, Reddit etc.

LudwigNagasena 3y ago

> "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a philosophical concept that many legal systems subscribe to in the context of criminal law. > Similar to when people cite the 1st amendment in situations where a private company is taking action Indeed, it’s very similar in the sense that the concept of the freedom of speech goes way beyond the 1st amendment. It existed before it. And it is the first amendment that exists because of the freedom of speech, not the other way round. > A private company can do what it wants within the bounds of the law. Yeah, including immoral actions that others may disagree with.

runarberg 3y ago
> Yeah, including immoral actions that others may disagree with. The morality in this instance does not follow this principle. If people find these allegations credible—and most should—the morally correct action is to deplatform him and delete his content.
- indoclay 3y ago
  > If people find these allegations credible—and most should Why should most people find these allegations credible? I do not believe there is a police report, arrest, and let alone a trial. These are currently just allegations, their credibility has not been adjudicated.
  - Airsinner 3y ago
    One might evaluate the situation based on what I think is called a "preponderance of evidence", combined with an understanding that the legal system is both slow and tends towards innocence unless a crime is proven "beyond a shadow of a doubt". A person may know how slow and different a legal decision is compared to what may be obvious and a reflection of reality, and therefore might arrive at a conclusion well before a system designed to be conclusive would. The law is more about what can be proven than it is about what is true, and for people who know that, legal judgement stands separately from moral evaluation.

afiori 3y ago

"innocent until proven guilty" and "freedom of speech" are principles codified in law. The position that only the government is bound by "freedom of speech" is, at the very least, weird in an international context where things that are not the US government are expected to respect people's freedoms. It is also perfectly legal to do a lot bad things like e.g. buying the product of slave labor in other countries or blood diamonds or buying stocks of companies known to pollute with wild disregard. Also in the US: > "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law. is misleading, the more precise version is that "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in criminal courts.

tored 3y ago

Sure, but the public can always remove all legal benefits a private stockholder company has, like liability.

bsndiieee665262 3y ago

[flagged]

zo1 3y ago

It's a principle we hold as a society.

epgui 3y ago

> "innocent until proven guilty" only applies in a court of law No, it doesn't "only" apply in a court of law. I choose to apply it in my own psyche (which breaks the "only"), and I choose to do so because I understand the reasons why a court of law applies the principle. Just because the whole village is wielding pitchforks doesn't mean it's rational for you to also do the same.

turquoisevar 3y ago
They used a turn of phrase of which the full meaning was implied. That meaning being “the concept of innocent until proven guilty is only universally applicable in a court of law”. So unless your psyche has any force beyond itself or it happens to be a court of law, your gotcha lacks any meaningful effect. Beyond you grandstanding that is.
- epgui 3y ago
  - It’s not meant to be a “gotcha” - It’s not about enforcing anything on anyone, I think you’re missing the point - Thank you for your contribution
- johnnyworker 3y ago
  They used it in the context of the question whether "we, the internet" have done away with it. So clearly it never referred to the legal system, and diverting to that is just kicking up sand to not let the people who are interested discussing the question as it was asked discuss it in peace.

orblivion 3y ago

It doesn't have to apply everywhere but it's still a good policy in a lot of contexts. I think a massive general audience platform is a good example. If this were, let's say, an online community of survivors of abuse, maybe that sort of prudence could reasonably take a back seat.

globular-toast 3y ago

This is such a common thing for people to say I have to wonder if it's propaganda from big corporations. The idea that core tenets of our civilisation are invalid because "it's a private company" is insane. These principles are based on practicalities, not technicalities.

Plasmoid 3y ago

There's this really neat section of law known as administrative law. One of the tenants is that you are allowed to have pretty much any rule that you want to have but you have to apply it in a reasonably impartial and fair manner. This means, you can setup random rules that you enforce capriciously.

turquoisevar 3y ago

Even then it’s a rather unfortunately named legal principle. It would’ve been better for it to be called “not-guilty until proven guilty” since criminal courts aren’t in the business of establishing innocence nor do they have the power to declare someone innocent. But I guess that doesn’t roll as nicely off the tongue.