Now it's more common to try to get 'bad' platforms dehosted altogether (e.g. Parler/Gab), subreddits try to get their 'alternatives' banned, and any company/group that challenges a big group is going to be bought out or otherwise dealt with. (See: FB's gobbling of companies to try to keep people in their garden instead of letting people chose which gardens they enjoy.)

We used to have the opportunity to walk into the woods and make our own playground. Now people will follow you and attack you for that. THAT'S the problem. Also we're becoming really fond of demanding community loyalty. HN doesn't have this problem (which is one reason I show up), but on other social media sites, it can be, for instance, forbidden to link to/talk about certain other sites. For example, on Reddit, it's common to ban people for posting in the 'wrong' Reddits, and on Twitter finding out somebody participates somewhere 'bad' is practically open season.

I should be able to go on HN and /b/, provided I follow my host's rules. I should also be able to set up my OWN site and explicitly say it's because I disagree with - say - HN's moderation policies without worrying about the site being attacked.

One of my less popular opinions in the queer community is that I AM a free speech absolutist (or close to it), even if it does result in some discrimination. (Even against me.) Of course we should minimize and work to eliminate discrimination in society, but that isn't the only value we have, and unfortunately social policies are always a case of trade-offs.

I also prefer to let the homophobes be open about it so a.) I know what they're saying and can undermine it and b.) so I know who to avoid. All pushing it underground does is make me nervous that everybody's a closet homophobe and means I can't change anybody's mind. (Which I have done on multiple occasions).

This is a good point! I think that the concept of "who do I want to associate with" is a different way to view things than "everyone I see in the world needs to treat me with agency"

I have a hard time knowing where that line is. Like you said,

> I AM a free speech absolutist (or close to it), even if it does result in some discrimination. (Even against me.)

People out there, due to their agency, may not agree with where my agency ends and theirs begins. I think if we have the privilege and feel able to "choose to avoid" those that we disagree with, we could have these discussions in the open without fear and actively change people's minds.

I don't know how to though. I've written about it here [1] but I still don't have a good answer for how do we draw that line of where your agency ends and mine/theirs begin.

[1] https://timonapath.com/articles/body-politic

I also tested well enough (I was the top scorer in the county on all of our standardized tests) that it was worth shutting up about my being a big fat homo.

That's a very different situation from a gay kid in an Evangelical home in rural Alabama in the 90s, or (moving outside of sexuality) an African American family in the US South in the 50s.

Agency is very tied into a person's individual circumstances, and trying to legislate rules and policy around that is a nightmare, particularly given it can change on a dime. (My MS diagnosis knocked out a fair chunk of my agency).

I think most people's instinct is to try to protect the most vulnerable, but that may end up stifling conversation to the point where the group dissolves/can't hold itself together OR opening people to being poached away to other groups OR other groups with different norms outcompeting or attacking that group.

We need to be careful not to monkey's paw ourselves.

> old country, where censorship was a thing. It is sad for me to see US going that route.

Why does this keep coming up? Nobody, absolutely nobody, is advocating for government restriction of free speech. That is the foundation of the US as a country.

Twitter didn't exist back then but newspapers certainly did. Town squares certainly did.

If the founding fathers wanted to say "if someone is speaking in a town square you can't throw tomatoes at them or shout them down", they would have.

Twitter moderating its content has zero to do with the foundations of America or censorship in other countries.

It is all fine and dandy to say 'build your own public square', but its point is somewhat lost, when you have a hard time even getting basic materials.

We Live In A Society. If you come to a public square - physically or on twitter, and scream something that the rest of society doesn't want to hear, you are exercising your free speech, and they are exercising theirs if they say they don't want to hear you.

I think there may be a disconnect between what we are trying to convey.

Public square is by definition.. public. It is not a possession of any one person. Anyone can grab a soapbox.

What I see now.. is soapbox oligopoly. That is an issue.

They don't because they want the tools and reach offered by private platforms, but don't want to follow their rules.

You can't have it both ways.

More to the point, so anyone can have a soapbox, but that soapbox will be kicked from under you in the form of hackers, ddos, and so on unless you use those tools. What is the next advice? Build your own Cloudflare? Your own ISP? It is madness and leaves us exactly where we are now.

You can't tell me everyone can have a soapbox if the soapbox is only theoretical in nature and in production deployment does not survive a day.

Edit: snarky comment removed.

Right. Just like a real-life soapbox.

I don't think you understand what it would mean to go into a public square - at ANY point in history, and start screaming the kinds of things that get you banned by Cloudflare, ISPs, and AWS.

We're not talking about stuff like "I have a different perspective on who should be chief of our tribe". The kind of political rhetoric that will inspire future generations of enlightened intellectuals to say "I disagree with what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it".

We're talking about content that has NEVER been acceptable to be preached in a public sphere. The kind of content that societies have always intolerated. Nothing is different. Nothing has changed about that.

I think we fundamentally disagree despite sharing the same initial assumptions.

My argument is effectively that EVERYTHING is a matter of perspective and therefore a matter of opinion and as such protected, because people will disagree about everything, but, if they are indeed enlightened, they will defend it as an opinion. Just by saying that some topics are off-limits, you squarely place yourself as the arbiter of truth, which is a tricky position to be in, because some ideas are just too dangerous to impressionable minds.

Here is the fun part. That is true. Ideas can absolutely wreak havoc, but the appropriate, albeit labor intensive, approach is to help people work through them and not try to suppress it or worse, force it into the shadows.

<< We're talking about content that has NEVER been acceptable to be preached in a public sphere.

I don't want to belabor the point, but there were tons of things that were not acceptable and now are acceptable precisely because some decided to challenge status quo of what is 'never acceptable'. If examples are needed, note how quickly question of homosexuality moved from barely whispered to openly celebrated in US society.

Now compare it to Twitter or Facebook. You don't know what you signing up for. Their TOS effectively say they can ban you for things they deem wrong. It is only recently that we know how they evaluate it ( see CNN discussion of FB speech violence tiers ).

Free speech is just that. It is free speech. There is no TOS. It includes all sorts of nasty bits too, because that is what being human is. Trying to pretend otherwise is, at best, counterproductive.

But here we are. Entire nation scared of reality and in dire need to cover it up with soft language.

<< But the founding principles have always had restrictions build in.

Do they? I am reading the constitution and I don't see those restrictions. You may get a visit from some agencies, but that is to make sure you were not joking.

On the other hand, I do see a mention of when slavery is ok in US and yet people seem surprised when it is pointed out.

You can say what you want. Just don't make it look like the army is saying this.

It may sound like a contradiction, but it is not. You voluntarily join the army. You join that specific group and accept their 'rules'. It is harder to argue ( not impossible since there are naturalized citizens, who clearly opt in to become citizens ) that citizens by right of birth voluntarily opt into that set of rules. That is the where constitution comes in.

What I am saying is that army argument is flawed.

edit: changed typical to average

[1]https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/...

My argument is every one believes there are limits to free speech they just place the boundaries at different places. And I stand by my position that the soldier example is on a fundamental level a restriction on free speech.

And that is a problem. Our communication depends on being able to articulate ourselves. Quality of our thoughts depend on the language. The quality of our discourse suffers, because our thoughts are being trained to offer 'safe' language.

If you do not see it as a problem, we have a problem.

So if we have lot of different options to access information and your views are still unwelcome in all but the most extreme places, then I think it reflects quite poorly on your views. You might not get a platform, but that doesn't mean you're being persecuted.

I think the problem is the monopoly on information, not its source. I understand some people disagree.

> So if we have lot of different options to access information and your views are still unwelcome in all but the most extreme places, then I think it reflects quite poorly on your views. You might not get a platform, but that doesn't mean you're being persecuted.

I agree with this. It's just important to still let those extreme places exist.

Free speech as a concept has definitely been abused by people distributing mis-information. That's more of a modern problem as network effects and technology made mass distribution and co-ordination of mis-information affordable outside of governmental organisations.

In terms of "extreme places", the Internet is pretty free from restrictions already. You can pretty much set up a website with content that's not acceptable on any of the large media platforms.

> Free speech as a concept has definitely been abused by people distributing mis-information. That's more of a modern problem as network effects and technology made mass distribution and co-ordination of mis-information affordable outside of governmental organisations.

This is true, however, I would say it needs to be balanced against the situation before, where institutions acted unchecked and it was often impossible to act at all outside of them. I am sympathetic to the argument that misinformation is a problem and I even agree with it, I just think the ways we discuss solving the problem would be worse. It's not enough to solve a problem: We should try to solve it in a productive way. Otherwise we end up with a Pyrrhic victory.

> In terms of "extreme places", the Internet is pretty free from restrictions already. You can pretty much set up a website with content that's not acceptable on any of the large media platforms.

This is why I focused on things like pressure to buy out, DDOSes, immense legal resources being brought to bear, etc. You can set up a website, but if it becomes big enough, people start going after it with things other than just speech, and THAT'S where I draw the line.

And then those "most extreme places" (Parler, Truth Social) invariably fail because of the "worst people problem".

https://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/1348101443404787718

Historically, this perspective has proven to be laughable. Criticism of Putin can hardly be found except for the most extreme places (in some locations)

That's driven by government persecution, so not really what we're talking about.

Every once in a while I come across a rumor that AHS and affiliated subreddits employ a strategy of posting illegal content (like child pornography) on subreddits/platforms that they want shut down for wrongthink. At some point it doesn't matter that the government allows for free speech if a small minority is able to control the flow of ideas for the rest of society; the effect is the same and technically an authoritarian government could trivially benefit from such censorship while ostensibly remaining neutral.

And, for the record, /b/ was the birthplace of hundreds of internet-wide memes in its heyday, with next to zero moderation. The fact that the average person can't stand an unmoderated forum doesn't mean that such fora have no place - especially considering the likelihood that there are campaigns (by the same type of people who try to get alternatives dehosted) to keep such places unusable by deliberately posting offensive and off topic content.

I think anonymity is OK personally, it falls into the tradition of anti-government pamphleteering in pre-Revolution colonial North America under British Royal rule, and samizdat literature in the USSR.

What's your thoughts on how we can defend against the shit flooding? I find yhis entire problem area really hard.

Another caveat to what I'm about to say is that I think we're in for a century of legal and political upheaval, so long term solutions will need to fit into whatever we build next.

That said, I think that there some things we could do.

I'd like to see/hear more about looking into the possibility of regulating sentiment, for example. Maybe you can write any POSITION you want on culture war issue X, but you can't write it in such a way it's only meant to inflame anger/cause despair/etc. Or perhaps you can, but you have to have some kind of warning label, or that content is allowed but turned off/blurred by default (like NSFW pics on Reddit), so you have to actively go out of your way to consume things that are 'bad' for you.

Also give people more tools and nudges. Like let people click through a Twitter profile and see that 80% of a person's Tweets are angry or about political topics. Somebody brought up tax policy as an example of something that doesn't get this treatment, and that's because tax policy is BORING and Slate/Newsmax aren't writing hit pieces about tax policy. People care about culture topics because the media whips them into a frenzy.

We could also force the companies to do due diligence in their R+D/feature implementations; maybe Twitter should be forced to prove that each new algorithm change makes people HAPPIER (or at least doesn't have terrible mental health effects).

Also I advocate for digital history and basic internet infrastructure information to be taught at the K-12 level; so much of the problem is that people don't understand how any of this works at a VERY BASIC level.

Much of the driving force behind today's dehosting is a result of increasing government intrusion into how information is shared on the internet. Congress has been openly threatening tech companies about "misinformation" for the past decade or so and this is a very predictable result.

One historical example that comes to mind that has nothing to do with capitalism is the uproar around the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages because it broke the Church's moral information monopoly.

They're bad because they're lying to people en masse and inciting rebellion.

And yes, I absolutely think that behavior that reaches that bar should be squelched. The dangers of enabling the spread of misinformation are entirely too visible in today's society.

The slippery slope argument is garbage in this case. No one has been banning political speech from major platforms. Heck, they bent over backwards to allow Trump and company to say the most outrageous things for years before finally stepping in and putting a stop to it.

And Parler being deplatformed for enabling the public organization of rebellion against the United States hardly seems like an "oh no, we're becoming Nazis!" moment.

It's only the most extreme views that result in deplatforming; "your view on taxes is different than mine" will never rise to that level, so there's no slippery slope.

So in what case can we justify enabling platforms to lie to people and incite violence? It simply can't be done.

If it's the first, I can find a TON of lying and misinformation on 'mainstream' sites and institutions. Off the top of my head, I can think of examples in the past year where the NYT and ACLU lied or misrepresented information, for example. There's also a shit ton of information flying around respectable Dem Twitter and Reddit whenever news events happen. Remember how many people thought that the people Kyle Rittenhouse shot were black and tried to stoke racial tensions using that talking point?

So obviously it's not the lying.

So let's talk about 'inciting rebellion.'

Everybody involved in the January 6th riot is a braindead moron. Trump is a braindead moron. And, frankly, if Trump were arrested, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. That doesn't mean we crack down on speech. It'd be like ordering the USPS to open letters and report people if they plotted their stupid Dollar Store peasant rebellion using paper letters, or tapping everybody's phones.

I'm also exceptionally uncomfortable with the idea that inciting rebellion is inherently bad, as somebody who does believe we should resist tyranny and people have the right to rebel.

They should have been able to talk about how much the government sucks all they want, they crossed the line when they showed up to break into Congress.

> It's only the most extreme views that result in deplatforming; "your view on taxes is different than mine" will never rise to that level, so there's no slippery slope.

Taxes, probably not, but it'll be really interesting to see how union discussions, for example, are handled. Also I could definitely come up with some tax policies that would get me deplatformed from the big spaces. We just haven't dragged taxes into the culture war yet.

That's not even close to "lying".

"Misrepresentation" can be a grey area that blends into framing and emphasizing certain parts over others. I didn't include misrepresentation on my list, and that was intentional. You can disagree with how an event is reported without the report containing any actual lies--and that falls under "a matter of opinion."

Things bouncing around "Dem Twitter," whatever that means, are hardly the fault of the NYT or ACLU. Whatever was said, it didn't enter my bubble, in that I never saw a claim that Rittenhouse shot any black people.

But I don't find Twitter useful, so I don't follow anything on it. Instead I read the NYT, and while I don't always agree with their editorials, I generally feel the information they publish as news is as accurate as they can figure out how to make it.

> It'd be like ordering the USPS to open letters and report people if they plotted their stupid Dollar Store peasant rebellion using paper letters, or tapping everybody's phones.

No, it really, really isn't like that.

It's more like shutting down stations from using the licensed public airwaves to disseminate incitement to violence or to broadcast blatant lies--and then later argue in court that "no reasonable person" should have believed those lies. I'm sure you know the latter actually happened, and the former was the law of the land until Reagan managed to tear down the Fairness Doctrine. [1] Which was found to be compatible with the First Amendment, and the only reason we don't have law to replace the original FCC rule is that Reagan vetoed it.

Regardless, my point is that there is potentially a way to limit speech that doesn't prevent people from complaining about the government but that also prohibits people from outright lying about the government (or other facts).

[1] https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/fairness-...

I don't think that's true because the frequency of bad ideas is evenly distributed. I'm sure there are many company owners that have those bad ideas and want to host them.

These ideas get suppressed because of societal norms. The problem here is when you disagree with the norm. I'm personally fine with making holocaust denial illegal, but it would be dishonest of me to claim that wasn't an authoritarian move, and that violates another, arguably more important norm! So we split the difference, and leave it up to individual choice. But that solution fractured when the internet split our norms into a thousand pieces, and has totally failed with the mainstream adoption of Trump and woke/cancel culture norms (both of which violate other, more important norms).

Frankly its terrible to feel like you're 'losing' people to bad ideas, and allowing communities to form around bad ideas accelerates the loss. We intuitively understand that some bad ideas are bad enough to lead to war, and vast human suffering. And so we come back to a justification for limited authoritarianism, because war is even worse than that.

I understand the desire to abide by European standards, because the Holocaust in particular was so horrific, but there are countries that have laws against things like promoting homosexuality, so clearly legality can't be the only moral arbiter here because the laws are a.) contradictory and b.) we recognize authoritarian governments make oppressive laws and we shouldn't comply with them. Which means we need another standard, one that defines Holocaust denial as impermissible but discussions of being gay as fine.

I don't think anybody should HAVE to host holocaust denial, but if somebody does, they shouldn't be attacked for it. (And 'attacked' meaning attempts made to take down the content/sue facetiously/DDOSing, etc. Nothing stopping people from mocking the host or pulling their money).

I'm also wary of things like 'hosting anti-semitism' as a justification, because what is considered anti-semitic varies (like most kinds of bigotry). Is it anti-semitic to criticize the government of Israel? What about the gender issues in Ultra-Orthodox communities? (I'm not Jewish, but I feel the same way about groups that I am a part of: I might not LIKE being called a dyke, seeing somebody say all homosexuals are depraved degenerates, etc. but that's not the same as calling for my murder or trying to get me fired.)

We actually have, and that is the Declaration of Human Rights.

Holocaust denial denies the very thing why this Declaration was formulated and accepted by all civilized nations. Discriminating against gay people violates Articles 1-3 of the Declaration.

The problem is that the US, its constitution being way older than the Declaration, has a far wider understanding of "free speech" and the responsibilities associated with it.

The problem is that there's no way companies are going to leave money on the table or authoritarian governments are going to agree to that, so then you're right back to the two different set of standards where companies proclaim in the EU/US/etc. that they follow content moderation according to the DHR while letting some countries erase gay people and women, and if that happens, their claim to any kind of moral stand or objectivity can't be taken seriously.

Frankly, I think this issue is going to require some VERY large changes to our systems to deal with, but first we have to go through the panic period where the people in power realized they fucked up and try to save the system that serves them well. I'm of the opinion our information expansion over the last 15 or so years is as monumental as the invention of writing or possibly even just the printing press. Social upheaval is going to follow, and until we establish new systems, it's hard to know how to use those systems to combat this problem.

For example, I think the Constitution is outdated and we should rewrite it.

"Oligopoly".

With the added problem that the big platforms are all subject to US "moral" censorship. Which a takeover by Musk won't fix.

Before global social networks your opinion didn’t matter either. And that was probably a good thing. People are entitled to their opinions but most peoples opinions are idiotic and shouldn’t be broadcast around the world to be picked up and amplified by other idiots.

> Before global social networks your opinion didn’t matter either. And that was probably a good thing. People are entitled to their opinions but most peoples opinions are idiotic and shouldn’t be broadcast around the world to be picked up and amplified by other idiots.

Oh but who decides what opinions are idiotic? This is how the idea of free speech emerged :)

This is a valid question. The answer is clearly not a firehose—free speech absolutist forums are selected against by users for the toxic pits they devolve into.

Multiple forums and the gating mechanisms of wealth and literacy were the Enlightenment era’s filters. We don’t want nor have those any more.

At scale, with naive ML clustering algorithms that also prioritize engagement... that devolves into bubbles.

(I think that's still the right answer, but the implementations need work.)

I'll gladly clear this one up for you. It is: whoever decided the T&Cs of the platform you're using - the ones you agreed to when you signed up.

If you're banned from Twitter for posting white supremacist hate speech, paedophilia, for organizing targetted harrassment or anything else Twitter deems contrary to their T&Cs remember that (depending on where you live) while you may have the right to express yourself, I have the right as the operator of a platform not to listen to you or have you on my platform.

What most of the people whining about being booted from Twitter are upset about is that they aren't able to annoy the people they want to anymore. I'm fine with this.

This is, in essence, selecting for experts spouting popular opinions. That’s a dangerous incentive model. (All before we even get to the question of delineating the experts.)

'I wish I'd been jabbed'...

It's like, other people would rather ignore reality, life and death, than budge on their uneducated opinions.

Ego is the enemy.

I'm no so sure about that. Since leaving social media, I've become quite involved in local politics. I now know some state legislators on a first-name basis and multiple directors of state departments in multiple states. I can call up people I've helped get elected and get my thoughts right to them. I find my opinion to effect much more change than it did when I was shouting into the digital void.

Like much in life, half the battle is just showing up.

You don't need social media to inform your representative of your opinions--and quite frankly, more direct communication is probably more effective in informing your representative of your opinions than social media.

Oh, irony..

come on man

This view somewhat misses the point. If you get on the big platforms and become famous, TODAY, you might have an opinion that matters to quite a few people. What about BEFORE? What platform were the big youtubers using in 2002? The big instagram influencers, where were their voices being heard in 1998? Paraphrasing you, "their opinions didn't exist".

At the point defined by the letter of the law

What about cases where the defendant can’t pony up the money to sue? What about cases where the defendant has no viable way to sue in the US, where the social media networks mostly reside?

> What about cases where the defendant can’t pony up the money to sue?

You don't sue abusers and people who send you death threats you report them to the police

Well, then, it's interesting that Spike Lee's comments were judged to be threatening harassment (he settled after legal action was taken against him and a judge ruled the case could proceed), yet he was never banned or removed from twitter.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/12/spike-lee-sued-...

Let me be clear, this isn't about the Martin case -- this is about an uninvolved person who had nothing to do with the case at all being singled out for harassment by Spike Lee. And @Jack thought it was just fine. This isn't about supporting some stealth agenda; it's about not telling a posse to attack some innocent old man.

Social Media actually was a huge "democratization" of the ability to give a very large voice to some very minority views.

Previously we had subjective - but real - barriers to having a voice.

As someone who lives in a deep red state, I can tell you that the banning of various alt-right voices from mainstream social media has amplified their appeal among those inclined to listen, not eliminated it. There are plenty of channels for sharing your ideas besides Facebook and Twitter, and they use them.

--

But we live in a Meta-gopoly. Basically a control system by pseudo-chosen monopolies in various verticals that are all run by NGOs, but in bed with GOs.... with a revolving door of influence.

Look at the revolving door between FB and the NSA, or the fact that Amazon is building, running GovCloud, or that the CEO owns one of the big media firms, and that he is able to get clearance for satellites and rocket launches...

The non-existent lines between global corporate influence and which governments either benefit or suffer from the tech reach is quite disturbing.

Everyone wants to reduce everything to laws for some reason when the whole reason they are laws is because we value them culturally. The law is a last resort. We shouldn't be setting societal boundaries merely on extreme limits of law.

Trying to fix these cultural issues at gunpoint via courts is no better than trying to fix culture via censorship and social isolation.

Then there is just a marketing angle of saying you're free speech to pull users from the platform that you think is against free speech.

The whole thing feels really shaky as a genuine movement and feels more like regulating companies they don't like.

Either way, we are shaping the landscape of free speech, when that's how the vast majority of communication, discussion and organizing happens.

That said, I don't know how someone looks at the history of reddit and still wants uncheck free speech.

Then it would be a clearly different situation.

Moving the goalpost. Nobody claimed private companies should ignore government sources.

You asked about “the government tell[ing] private platforms what speech is acceptable.” That would be a First Amendment violation.

> What would government restriction on speech look like if not soft (effective) influence on big media companies?

Flippantly: Russia.

Less flippantly: freedoms exist in balance. Taking an absolutist stance on individual speech curtails freedom of association. In practice, I suspect it will make most social media unusable in its current form. (Which may be for the worst.)

You asked about “the government tell[ing] private platforms what speech is acceptable.” That would be a First Amendment violation.

You saw the parent's linked article about the White House flagging posts for Facebook, right? Are you trying to make the argument that it's OK if the government "suggests" what Facebook/Twitter should do with posts on their platform, but they're only crossing the line if they _make_ Facebook/Twitter flag certain posts? I think it's a distinction without difference. The usual scenario I give people in this situation is, how would your view on this change if Trump "suggested" how Facebook could flag certain posts and then Facebook followed through with it. No demands, just "suggestions." Still OK with this relationship between the government and a private company?

No. Nobody was. That’s why it was moving the goalpost [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts

What is Musk's definition of open? How is that any better than the status quo? Because your bias happens to overlap with Musk's? Given his treatment of whistleblowers and employees at his current companies it's not at all clear that he actually values openness and free speech.

Free speech is a fundamental human right, outside of any document.

So yeah, there's a pretty strong case to be made that certain internet companies are like that. Can you survive without social media? Sure, but you can also survive without sewer. It's just a lot harder to live a normal life.

That’s not the dynamic occurring today, social media is available in even the most rural setting, albeit in a reduced form to support low bandwidth.

Do we really want to allow Facebook and Twitter monopoly status and then treat them as defacto government entities? Will that result in better services? I do not think so.

As we’ve seen with TikTok’s rise, competition within the space leads to better outcomes, not treating social media companies as “utilities”. Social media companies are not in any way comparable to a sewer system, an electric grid, or a phone line network.

SM is clearly different from that and very much still in flux, and overly regulating it would be more of a burden than an advantage. Some amount of regulation may help though, especially designed to encourage diversity of ideas.

But mostly I wanted to counter the meme that "it's not censorship if it's a private company". Yes it is, when you have only one twitter and a handful of SM companies in total. It's not the ownership that matters, it's the ubiquity and the effect.

They all require physical infrastructure to every house, to provide service capacity. As such, we don't want 7 different companies for each, laying 7 different sewer systems and 7 different electric grids.

When the service is virtual, the same infrastructure limits don't materialize in the same way. We don't need to run new ISP lines to bring on a new platform.

So while ISP are certainly more like classic utilities, websites and social platforms just aren't.

>But mostly I wanted to counter the meme that "it's not censorship if it's a private company". Yes it is, when you have only one twitter and a handful of SM companies in total. It's not the ownership that matters, it's the ubiquity and the effect.

Corporate censorship isn't a "free speech" problem. SM companies just aren't enough like a utility, they are not actually required to function in society (unlike electricity, and running water).

Did you learn nothing from the battle over NetNeutrality?

I think decentralization is better way than building one big ISP controlled by the government. I live in a place (Utah), that has a non profit owned fiber infrastructure and leases it out to different ISPs, where you can even buy the dark fiber yourself for like $2500. I can choose from 10-15 ISPs with highly competitive prices and service. The ISPs can have whatever policies they want but the free market will take care of them pretty fast.

Exposure to diversity of ideas is not a problem on social media. What drowns out most ideas is actually threat of cyberbullying and internet mobs, being drowned out by bots, and algorithmic sorting that prioritizes controversial content over moderate voices. Only the last one is related to moderation/editorial choices by the company and it’s rarely framed as a free speech issue.

I wonder if limited Section 512 reform is the answer [1].

Remove it for social media platforms over a certain size that sell ads. Create a safe harbour if they form an independent appeals commission, like the one Facebook did; but with teeth on enforcement, tightly-scoped but binding rulemaking powers, and rules about how its members are chosen. Company can flag and ban. Users can appeal. Commission can go to the courts to enforce its will or force discovery. (Maybe throw in a couple commission members elected by users, I don’t know.)

[1] https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/copyright/copyr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

I disagree. The whole social media industry is rotten and needs a dose of... something... to bring it back to sanity. Strict limits on user data collection and algorithmic "feeds" would be a good start IMHO. Otherwise the same patterns repeat themselves, where the most rage-inducing content gets spread the furthest.

If you, engaged user of a tech site, a developers forum, have no idea what that should look like, then why would the "something" from politicians work out better?

It has never been an issue before because the means of communication have always been limited but modern electronic communication has changed all that and it's clear that we can't exist in this wild west phase anymore.

SM had eroded the trust in institutions and between people and groups. It had put all of us in bubbles just to sell ads. Informational and cognitive hygiene must be recognized and taught to everyone so people can defend themselves and take care of what they hold dear and true.

In my experience, there is actually not a pretty strong case to be made for that, as evidenced by all the people who say there is a strong case to be made, but then fail to make a strong case. Perhaps they mean, "a case which convinces me, specifically, 1 person who is already convinced"?

Also, trying to survive without sewer is what led to The Plague's last big hit. Even the Romans knew it was unhealthy. Meanwhile, in this case, INCREASED use of social media is what's been shown to be unhealthy.

Especially given:

1) The number of digital outlets. Utilities tend to be regulated when there are no alternatives or merely 1 alternative (especially when monopoly is being intentionally granted for the purposes of not duplicating infrastructure). We're not hurting for options in ways to talk to each other these days.

2) The abundance of very diverse conversations on display on the most popular social media. Political poles are pretty well represented with content in proportion to their influence (and all this even considering that the right of private vehicles for speech to set rules for discussion and even make editorial choices is itself a free speech right).

It's anecdotal, but I don't feel this to be true in my personal life. I am not on Facebook by choice. But I feel like it impoverishes my life in a number of ways:

1. Most of my family and friends post their life updates on Facebook. 2. My neighborhood uses a Facebook group for most communication and coordination. 3. Several local companies use their Facebook pages to broadcast their events, sales, etc, and as their primary form of outreach. 4. Several local hobby groups do the same.

In each case, this is general communication and information that I want in my life, but I can't get it easily. Even when I go out of my way to get it (private conversations, visiting websites, etc), I still miss things because Facebook has the network and it's the primary way my communities communicate.

So while in principle I agree with everything you said, in my own life I empathetically agree with the subjective sense that it feels like a utility. It feels like living without something important in some ways.

(It was easier when I was married and my wife was on Facebook and could relay information to me. Also anecdotal, but I've heard of this arrangement a number of times.)

In this context we can't afford to treat these companies as private entities. They should not be able to block/ban whoever they want just because they feel threatened and challenged by their views.

Are all the radios broken? Do newspapers not exist? Has TV vanished? Fox News alone has millions of viewers every week. There are hundreds of other outlets from which people get their news.

You really think Twitter can unilaterally erase something from public consciousness?

It's one thing to be denied access to these platforms. It's another thing entirely to see a specific opinion pushed on the young and the less critical, trickling down to actual demands, rules and restrictions. These platforms are powerful enough to do so. You can find many examples of misinformation translating to demands in CS and IT alone, and these are still relatively harmless.

The miscommunication is that you presume "That doesn’t mean", whereas the whole discussion is about whether that's desired or not.

I’ve explained my reasoning against the utility claim. If you want to defend it, do so. It might be reasonable, but you haven’t offered anything other than substituting it with a different argument.

In the public utility metaphor, utilities were not defined until they became defined. There's no reason to discount a possible category of "utilithing" that shares some properties with the existing one but not others.

It might be that I missed your explanation (was it in a sibling thread?), but in this thread I don't see a consideration for that idea. "They are not so vital" is not an argument against it, but your personal value judgement.

So 5% of all adults? Yes, I just made up that number, just like you did.

If only Fox News is covering something and you’re not allowed to talk about it on Twitter, Facebook, etc. then there’s no effective way for it to reach everyone who doesn’t watch Fox.

Where does this end, anyway? Should we also force people to consume OAN or InfoWars? Can I get my blog on this required reading list?

If your issue is online discourse in general, then we’re in a good place: it’s very easy to set up your own website and distribute whatever content you want without needing permission from corporations.

If you think it might be a necessity in the future, then we can talk about it then, if you're right.

As you mentioned, some of them have a convincing case behind them, though, like climate change. Those are worth entertaining, IMO

  > The implication here is that this doesn't have a convincing case behind it?

  > Then when would you act?

  > maybe proactive caution around big business should be the norm given all the historical abuses

Even this I'd say is a stretch. If they're consuming any kind of news or contemporary entertainment, Twitter is absolutely impacting their lives. The degree to which it quickly propagates groupthink and shared narratives is difficult to overstate.

We live in a society, so of course popular things will have nth-order effects on everyone’s lives. TikTok, Facebook, Fox News, the New York Times, Disney, Nintendo, Steam, Itch, Bandcamp, your friend’s podcast. It’s extremely unclear to me why Twitter should be singled out here.

It certainly did, but not as quickly, and not in a separate channel from the media itself.

Put bluntly: today's journalists, entertainers, and influencers can very quickly arrive at the same (sometimes factually incorrect) narrative through following the same in-group of people on Twitter, which then results in "real" news, entertainment, and other media being produced that share the same groupthink and narrative. This can happen in hours, even minutes.

But it's not clear to your average consumer that what's dictating the stories on nightly news, Saturday Night Live, or the late night shows is actually Twitter, and the ease with which the same people can create the same bubbles without explicitly coordinating.

Not really but that sense of learned helplessness is certainly good for their bottom line. I imagine it increases your propensity to buy whatever crap they're spamming your feed with.

In reality life without social media is a much happier existence.

Off topic but I don't think banning heroin did anyone any good. We still need proper labeling, packaging, and storage laws. We still need laws that prohibit drugging someone without their explicit permission. We probably need laws that don't allow sale to minors. We probably need ban on advertising "controlled substances". We might even say certain things you can only get under medical supervision by a licensed medical professional.

I just don't think possession ought to be a crime like it is today. Endangering others, sure but possession is just asking for abuse by law enforcement.

The popularity of Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google’s core products isn’t the issue. The issue is that any time a successful competitor comes up, they can just buy them out.

Imagine if Facebook wasn’t able to buy Instagram, and it had survived as a competing platform?

There’s no need to apply the concept of “free speech” to private companies. There is every need to regulate monopolies so that a handful of tech giants don’t have the power to effectively suppress content across the majority of the outlets people are using every day.

Holy crud, then break them up if they're that powerful. The right to private moderation is part of the 1st Amendment and should only be abridged in very specific circumstances; don't get rid of the 1st Amendment just because you're scared of Facebook's lobby arm.

There are lots of platforms other than Twitter/Facebook. Anti-monopoly regulation against tech companies has reasonably wide bipartisan support in the US. We also have more evidence nowadays that social media doesn't necessarily have to result in natural monopolies. There are so many things we could do rather than significantly abridge people's rights to free association.

- The government could dump monetary grants into Mastodon/Matrix or otherwise subsidize federated/self-hosted alternatives the same way that we've subsidized renewable energy.

- The government could stop allowing purchases by these tech giants in general.

- The government could split up Facebook/Instagram/Horizon.

- The government could push for more open app policies on stores or regulate sideloading (seriously, the amount of pushback this idea gets as a violation of Apple's rights, compared to the amount of support for regulating social network moderation is wild to me. Both of those are an interference in private rights, but one of those things is also a significantly bigger restriction of 1st Amendment rights than the other).

- The government could force open APIs between services (Europe is trying to do this, we'll see whether or not they get it right).

- If that's too much interference into the market, the government could explicitly legalize adversarial interoperability and revise the CFAA to make it easier to scrape websites.

- Then there's an entire conversation to be had about payment systems online and why we have some of the market forces that we do have around monetizing eyeballs and paying for content.

----

But to immediately jump to treating Facebook as a public utility -- not only is that a really drastic step with a lot of 1st Amendment implications, it's also kind of a depressing step because it assumes we couldn't make better social networks than Facebook/Twitter, and I absolutely believe we could. It's depressing to think that we can't ever move past them and the only thing we could do is just try to reduce one specific problem that they have.

I don't want Facebook to be an essential service; even if they didn't censor anything I don't want to use Facebook. I don't really care what their moderation policy is. I hate almost everything about the website; I want alternatives, not a more regulated monopoly. I don't even like the ad-supported model in the first place, I think that monetizing attention is antithetical to creating a good social network.

On the other hand, a robust market has fewer of those problems -- the US deciding "we don't want a US company to control the entire market, and we want more companies with differing policies" doesn't have the same implications as the US deciding, "we want the US company to do what we want everywhere." So there's a lot less exceptionalism rolled up in the idea of subsidizing alternatives; and non-US governments have already started to talk about either subsidizing some alternatives like Matrix or adopting them internally within government departments.

Unless the idea is to only regulate how Facebook handles content being displayed to US users, but (while companies do often have country-specific policies), drastically increasing the scope of that kind of system has a lot of its own implications about filter bubbles and communication between countries.

As one example, France has generous tax deductions that effectively triple the value of your contribution for places like Framasoft, although it's not necessarily targeted just at free software.

Network effects -> market forces -> political will

I think splitting up these giants is supremely important, but the only healthy approach long term is to require open APIs for cross-service interoperability. This is the only solution to separate network effects from market forces.

It's not unreasonable to want to be able to communicate with your friends, family, and brands you like in a convenient way.

_Either_ you require interoperability so that people can separate their (real) social networks from their choice of technological-implementation, _or_ you allow things to grow unbounded such that they become de facto utilities.

I'm interested in seeing how EU legislation works out here. I tend to sometimes be relatively skeptical about EU legislation because I think the final results tend to miss the mark or get compromised or have side-effects, but I have seen a lot of people that I respect a lot say that this legislation is good, so I'm really curious to see what happens with it.

I don't personally think that network effects are the only thing that's factoring into current tech dominance -- my evidence for that is that Facebook has had to buy competitors before, and I don't think they would have felt that threat if they were confident in network effects alone to save them. I've also gone through enough internal emails from the various leaks from Facebook to where I can see some the anti-competitive strategies they tried that (in my mind) were in a very different category than just locking down an API. But network effects are certainly an important part of the puzzle, and even ignoring the market, having more user agency to remotely control accounts and build/use their own clients for services is (in my opinion) a really important part of individual freedom, so I'm all for improvements in that area.

And highly agreed, the problem with Facebook is not that people want to talk to friends and family. I don't think that people's instincts to be connected to each other should be treated as something that's unreasonable or bad.

Different people have different ideas about where to draw these lines: I personally am fairly skeptical about requiring hosting services to carry content, I think that has a lot more implications than people realize and I think that autonomy over how people manage computers and what content they serve is something we should try very hard to protect.

On the other hand I was initially skeptical of network neutrality back when it was first entering the public debate, but ended up completely changing my views and supporting it pretty much wholesale, I think that there's decent historical evidence that Title 2 classification didn't harm Internet innovation last time we tried it (in fact, the opposite happened, innovation exploded), and also I think there's much stronger evidence that service providers are actually a natural monopoly and could be treated like a public service. And I think the risk of unintended consequences is much lower.

And I also support either forcing Apple to allow alternative app stores or (possibly better) just forcing them to allow alternate web browsers and to loosen restrictions on what platforms/websites apps can tell the user about, so that PWAs can start making progress again on iOS and browsers can start to fill in the gaps in their platform -- which obviously is a restriction of their rights, I just think the benefits heavily outweigh the downsides.

My feeling is that every time we go deeper down the chain and closer to the "bare metal" of how the Internet works, it becomes a little bit safer to regulate neutrality. We have a lot of low-level changes we can make to the Internet that could go a lot further towards correcting some of the actual flaws that the Internet has, rather than just trying to regulate symptoms of those flaws.

The implications of FAANG moderation are only so serious because FAANG companies control so much of the market. It is better to actually fix that problem rather than to try and slap a band-aide on top of it (especially when that band-aide might carry a lot of unintended consequences).

This tells me that most people are quite happy with limits on free speech, just not "their side".

Leaving FB properties, for example, is actually pretty nice when you've hit a certain spot in your life. Some forums give me much more than FB ever did. HN is more useful. There isn't some necessary set of social media sites everyone has to have.

Twitter is a service for sharing your opinions with the public. Obviously terms of service are going to include limits around your ability to share your opinions. If the service had no terms, that would mean that you could post 1 million spam replies to every single tweet anyone made.

Similarly Twitter's TOS shouldn't include anything around electricity usage.

But this new constituency emerged after events like Gamergate and Charlottesville protests, and they show up to defend participants in events like those but can't be mobilized to become active in other issues that historically have been ones where people become involved out of principle.

If I wrote the rules, anytime someone used the phrase "political opinions you dislike" there would be a popup list for the following before you can submit your comment:

* violent incitement

* Al Qaeda and ISIS

* state sponsored misinformation campaigns run by automated bots

* coordinated messages from automated bots for marketing & brand management

* harassment

* doxxing

* defamation

* revenge porn & child porn

* vaccine misinformation

* election misinformation

* spam and phishing attacks

And next to each you can click a checkbox to indicate which ones you personally endorse being defended as protected speech, which you believe to be implicated. Then people can mouse over the part of your comment that says "political opinions", see the list of things you clicked on, and know what you are talking about.

This way we don't have to worry that you're equivocating between garden variety political topics (e.g. the economy, taxes) and all the other stuff when you say "political opinions you dislike."

Do you think Twitter optimizes their speech policies for a good user experience? My impression is that things that are very mainstream are disallowed on Twitter while very fringe ideas as allowed

I don't mind if Twitter wants to offer me their own opinion about which posts are bad and which people are bad, but I should be allowed to opt out of that. Better still, they could have multiple competing paid services offering filtering/blocking tailored to different themes. Paid—because if they have an economic incentive to satisfy their subscribers, they'll satisfy their subscribers. The problem with the free filtering done by Twitter today is that they have an economic incentive to satisfy their shareholders.

Not really.

…you appreciate the point being made by the parent post right?

Unmoderated communities devolve, in practice, to porn, scams, flame wars and trolling. There’s lots of evidence that’s how things turn out.

What you’re after is different moderation, not no moderation; what you see as excessive moderation can’t be replaced with no moderation without creating a clone of 4chan.

So.. I guess.. just remember what you’re asking for is actually a bad thing. What you actually want isn’t what you’re asking for; unless what you want is 4chan, in which case, you can just go hang out there instead of on twitter..

But I don't see the parallel between that kind of moderation and a firehose like Twitter. My experience of twitter is almost entirely defined by the people I follow. Yes there's junk and the occasional troll, but I'm an adult capable of making observations about the properties of any "bad" content I might see. Expecting other people to sanitise my experience for me is unhealthy and doomed to failure.

This is probably, broadly speaking, false.

Maybe it was once true, and maybe it should be true, but I guess it’s more likely that most people (including you) see and interact with all the people you follow, interacting with all the people they follow (retweets, etc.) interacting with all the people they follow.

3 degrees of separation.

If you never saw any tweets other than the immediate people you follow tweeting to each other, then perhaps… but, that’s not how twitter works.

…and then on top of that, how did you end up following those people? Personal friends? Or perhaps, via twitters moderated hash tags?

That’s different moderation, not no moderation.

What you’re describing is something closer to signal/WhatsApp groups; different, much less moderated personal groups. Sure. Good for what it is…

There’s an app for that; it’s just not twitter.

Which is pretty much exactly the point I was making in my original contribution to this thread.

Yes to the degrees of separation. That's the point of following people—to be exposed to their curation. I followed many people because they were friends of friends; I've unfollowed many people because I wasn't impressed with the people they interacted with, even if I had no problem with them.

On the other hand, blocking someone for making jokes about a celebrity's weight (which Twitter has done!), is something that, in my opinion, is an example of an overreach.

I would love shared filters on twitter. For instance, if I don't want to hear things about topic X, I can download a topic X filter that's community maintained that hides posts from troll accounts or keywords. You can mix and match filters. This is better than banning people. Is twitter going to allow back all those people that were banned for discussing lab theory?

That's your opinion, and you're absolutely welcome to hold it. I understand that position, but I don't agree, and I would prefer a more strongly moderated platform. That's my opinion. If a platform has too little moderation for my tastes, I may choose to leave it, and that would be bad for an ad-based platform's profitability, not to mention network effects, etc. Given enough users (and employees!) who think like me, the platform has an incentive to perform stronger moderation.

I think we should have more platforms to choose from, and maybe even require some kind of inter-operation between them. We should enforce existing anti-trust law on these big platforms, not try to force them to change their moderation policies.

"Banning someone from a platform for expressing an offensive view is not moderation"

What if an offensive view creates abuse? Who defines obvious?

There’s the word media in social media. A newspaper will carry a theory, but not an article using the theory to spuriously decry public health mesures.

This is a good point!

I agree with both you and the parent - which is to say that I'm entirely torn on this subject.

Moderation on platforms makes sense. Trying to work out where to draw the line is difficult. And free speech is incredibly important.

How to balance these competing concerns is really beyond me.

I'm a proponent of the idea of "the solution to bad speech, is more speech", but if you take this to its logical conclusion on the internet, you often end up in the wild west.

If that's the logical conclusion, and I'm making the assumption this based on your observations, why are you a proponent of it?

"I think this is for the best, however it always leads to problems"

Well to be fair, I did say I was torn on this and have no answers :)

The concept of "the solution to bad speech, being more speech" is somewhat of a safe default to me. All things being equal, I think it's more important to err on the side of protecting the voices of those who should and need to be heard, while accepting the risk that these very protections may also inadvertently benefit "extremists" in that they too are more likely to be heard.

I prefer this balance, as opposed to the opposite, of strict moderation. Silencing the voices of those with something important to say, in order to ensure that we don't let any extremists get their views out.

So that's my default starting position.

But I'm not absolutist about it. I think we can't be too binary about it, at either end of the spectrum. The answer is not one of two choices, "100% no free speech" or "100% free speech". Instead, it's presumably somewhere in the middle.

So the answer is probably, "light touch, just enough moderation, based on some form of consensus".

How you define "just enough" is a tough problem.

Perhaps it's the consensus part that's missing at the moment.

You can reconcile the tension by insisting that the public utility platforms (e.g., Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc.) remain neutral with respect to non-criminal content, but give people the tools to moderate and curate speech at a more granular level (like subreddits, or tools to filter who you see on Twitter).

Eg I don’t really use Twitter at all apart from the odd tweet that will be referred to me. I moderate what I see by actively avoiding most social media (aside from HN of course) because I’ve decided that this is the easiest way to avoid sub-standard content that doesn’t add value for me. (A sweeping statement but just for sake of argument).

So let’s say someone says something extremely insulting about a minority group - just on the right side of legal, but otherwise a disgusting remark when measured against social norms.

Do we say that the utility platforms shouldn’t touch this because it’s not illegal?

Because some of those subgroups of people and individuals with the moderation/curation responsibilities will proliferate that content rather than moderate it.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, and I’m not arguing for strong censorship - I don’t have a counter suggestion, I’m just thinking it through…

I think that probably stems mostly from Hacker News avoiding controversial subjects in general. When they do slip through, the moderation can be pretty bad, particularly when it comes to new accounts. I've seem innocuous comments shadowbanned for voicing fairly milquetoast heterodox opinions (with shadowbanning in general being a pretty unpleasant action). Usually that isn't an issue with accounts that have been here for a long time, but since Hacker News doesn't allow people to delete comments, you have to be comfortable with having that comment tied to you for decades to come (not always the safest thing in this environment).

The whole thing ends up exerting a chilling effect on alternative opinions.

We see this with Twitter now. People complain about various tweets being blocked, and there's always a "back-and-forth" about how Tweet A is against their guidelines but somehow Tweet B isn't. But when they outright ban (e.g.) Donald Trump, there's no ambiguity any more. The discussion moves beyond the minutia of spam / bot handling and into something more concrete.

Though you're right: censorship of those with smaller voices is at least as problematic. We just all ultimately have limited resources available and focusing on the more clear-cut examples is more likely to be successful.

There are other ways to implement moderation that isn't censorship.

I've proposed "blocklists" before, where users could create different blocklists (e.g. "no vegans"), other users could subscribe to them, and there would be some default blocklists (e.g. "no porn" and "no gore") that people could also unsubscribe...

Solutions like this look great initially if everyone uses them properly, but everything falls apart when people inevitably start actively abusing the new feature. The design needs to handle assholes-at-scale from the outset.

You choosing to listen to something doesn't mean you also get to force whatever platforms you want, to carry whatever you choose to listen to.

I find it hard to believe that there is someone you want to listen to, who you currently aren't able to, because twitter deplatformed them.

That's a red-herring. The debate isn't really about free speech rights on a private platform. 'Web-scale' platforms will always need a certain level of moderation. This debate is really about the who is within the Overton window and who isn't. Conservatives and certain parts of the Progressive Left want to be within this Overton window, while mainstream Democrats want to keep them out.

Having said that, there is a related matter of government's indirect incursion into moderation policies of private social media companies, by way of use of executive and legislative threats, and what that actually means for constitutionally protected speech. Right now that part is ignored by the supporters of one political party because it serves their political goals.

Contrary to this, we should have a free speech culture where the norm is that people can say what they want. Moderation is necessary but it should always be an exception.

> Note that you’re choosing to spend your time on HN (a relatively strongly moderated forum) instead of a less moderated forum like 8chan’s /b/.

Moderation on HN is based on tone and quality, not content. This distinguishes it from almost everywhere else on the internet.

... That is still content-based moderation, since it's based on the actual text being written and not the circumstances (time, place, manner) of its writing.

Once you have human arbiters determining what is and what is not "good" information, and censoring based on it, you are acting in bad faith against free speech.

This is entirely a social media age problem. This isn't "OMG, we're censoring" it's "we're applying the same limitations that have always existed on a new medium" - which is people deciding on what is in good taste (to them) and appropriate for their platform (to them).

That's what free speech culture is about. It's the idea that "everyone gets their say" and by disagreeing and arguing, we get closer to the truth. It's sad that more and more people are taking your view, which is that people can publish contrary opinions but there's no reason in particular to do so.