[HN Gopher] Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub
Author : amrrs
Score : 393 points
Date : 2021-01-14 17:37 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencemag.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencemag.org)
| koolk3ychain wrote:
| I hate that I have to preface this, but I'm a democrat who voted
| for Biden and doesn't question the outcome of the election. That
| said, our society does not need this kind of gerrymandering in
| our online discourse. People need to forget politics for a second
| and realize the true harm companies like this are inflicting by
| effectively playing god.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I think the message of holding social media accountable for the
| harm it causes everybody is being drowned out by the hyperbolic
| statements like "effectively playing god".
|
| They are not playing god. They own a platform, they are
| determining who can and cannot speak on that platform. That's
| the same thing every news paper, internet forum, email server,
| BBS, public bulletin board, or really any publishing of any
| kind has done since the invention of publishing.
|
| Twitter is not part of the government, and it does not have a
| monopoly on internet communication. Hell, it doesn't even
| charge for its services. You are not entitled to use their
| platform.
|
| If you are disgusted and disappointed in social media for their
| behavior, that's perfectly reasonable! There are things you can
| do about it! you can refuse to use their service, refuse to
| recommend it to friends, promote competitors, etc.
|
| What you cannot do is pretend that just because they are a
| large wealthy organization you have some kind of right to use
| their platform to say whatever you want.
| [deleted]
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Did you enjoy the party?
|
| Everyone cheered Twitter when they started taking down accounts,
| sure that it would never affect them. Everyone ignored the
| warnings that it is a very slippery slope.
|
| Well, after a fun party, the bill is due.
| bArray wrote:
| I for one am glad that our new moral enforcers are keeping us
| safe from the possibility of free academic knowledge.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Moral and legal are different.
|
| I think Sci-Hub is ethical. I'm under no illusions that this
| somehow makes it legal.
|
| Sci-Hub explicitly bills itself as a "pirate website."
| Twitter's rules explicitly ban both copyright violation and
| illegal activities. Therefore Sci-Hub is violation of Twitter's
| rules.
|
| Twitter may well be very selective in their enforcement, but
| the fact that Sci-Hub is violating Twitter's rules is not in
| doubt, is it?
| orionblastar wrote:
| What about The Pirate Bay account? Should it be banned as
| well?
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Did Sci-Hub Twitter account shared copyrighted material
| actually?
| convery wrote:
| Don't need to post to be guilty of wrongthink..
| oytis wrote:
| Really, why can't US and/or EU government allocate a modest sum
| from the budget to establish public journals and solve the
| problem forever. This system seems so obviously broken.
| lovecg wrote:
| This is eyebrow raising but hardly the news to lose any sleep
| over. If for example Google were to unilaterally purge sci-hub
| from its search results (for "greater good", not as a result of
| however questionable but legal-at-this-point takedown request)
| that would be a serious escalation.
| tyingq wrote:
| Not a fan of "pirated" as the descriptive word for what Sci-Hub
| does. I'm sure some of it fits that description. On the other
| hand, a fair amount of these papers are funded with taxpayer
| dollars, and shouldn't be hidden behind paywalls in the first
| place.
| ABeeSea wrote:
| The chairs at the DMV are also paid with taxpayer dollars. I'd
| be arrested if I tried to walk out the door with one.
| kache_ wrote:
| You wouldn't download a chair from the DMV
| typenil wrote:
| That's totally the same thing - because downloading a paper
| destroys the original copy.
| rektide wrote:
| Let's talk about the purpose of these things, chairs &
| papaers.
|
| The purpose of a chair is to enhance the space it resides
| in by enabling folks to rest/sit in the chair.
|
| The purpose of a paper is to document science, such that
| others can see that science, replicate it, learn from it,
| extend it; the purpose of a paper is to present science
| such that we can all beget yet more science to happen.
| superkuh wrote:
| If you took a photo of one of the chairs and looked at it at
| home you'd be just fine though. You're mixing up theft and
| copyright infringement.
| jancsika wrote:
| Someone should design a a front-end framework for which
| anachronistic analogies like this make sense.
|
| E.g., if a user selects some text and chooses "Copy," the
| text gets deleted and a listener sends a message back to the
| server to signal that the text has been "pirated."
|
| At that point the server not only deletes the associated
| data, but sends a message to all extant clients to remove the
| given text.
|
| Kinda like a realtime borrow-checker, but not so much for
| memory safety as for the sheer stupidity of it.
|
| Edit: clarification
| jenwkejnwjkef wrote:
| Intellectual "property" is not property.
| [deleted]
| young_unixer wrote:
| 100th reminder to stop using Twitter and to stop acting like it's
| an acceptable medium of communication.
| [deleted]
| specktr wrote:
| What's your alternative method to reach a mass audience?
| bob1029 wrote:
| Produce something of actual intrinsic value and the word
| usually gets out on its own. Find smaller communities that
| are more focused on what you actually care about. Targeting
| the entire internet as your desired audience is the root
| cause of most of our troubles today.
| d100 wrote:
| pg: "Twitter made a mistake in banning Sci-Hub."
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1349771657485955074
|
| To say the least.
| 49531 wrote:
| I think the general discourse around high profile account banning
| raises some interesting questions. I've seen a lot of people in
| my (generally liberal) social bubble carry the line that Twitter,
| as a private corporation, has the right to ban accounts for
| whatever reason they see fit. While technically this is true,
| should it be? Is there a threshold where a service becomes more
| of a public good than a private enterprise? I think a lot of us
| would argue that making ISPs into publicly owned utilities would
| be beneficial for users.
|
| I think perhaps a legislative approach to monopoly should be
| nationalizing rather than breaking up. Monopolies can be valuable
| for consumers if their claws are trimmed.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Monopolies are wonderful if used responsibly. Having 1 standard
| way to do something across the board can solve entire universes
| of problems. Interstate highway system, electrical grid,
| internet, etc. all fall very cleanly into that bucket.
|
| Splitting up a technology company like Amazon or Google would
| probably just make matters worse over the long haul. Instead of
| 1 obvious regulatory target you would wind up with several and
| this creates more shadowy areas for perverse incentives to grow
| like mold. Just look at how splitting up ATT has played out. It
| ultimately re-aggregated into more-or-less the same monster but
| with even more power and influence than in the 80s. If ATT
| would have been nationalized instead of split up, I'd have a
| hard time believing we wouldn't have better internet access on
| average today.
| bgilroy26 wrote:
| >Interstate highway system, electrical grid, internet, etc.
| all fall very cleanly into that bucket
|
| Insurance is another highly networked product that benefits
| from monopoly
|
| The insurance companies of the 19th and 20th centuries were
| boons to society because their local buckets of money could
| be invested in local businesses and spent (practically as a
| donation) on advertising at the minor league baseball diamond
| or the church bulletin
|
| The sooner we mitigate the loss of those good effects, the
| sooner We can benefit from the efficiency of insurance
| monopolies whose risk pools will be as large as is
| practicable rather than driven by historical accidents
| 2ion wrote:
| Who cares about Twitter anymore? Telegram has more active users
| than this minor blogspam outlet :)
| hetspookjee wrote:
| Iirc Twitter was really close to going down before Trump's
| election brought it back to life. I'm guessing Twitter will be
| back to that state in some time.
| tehjoker wrote:
| "Counterfeit goods"? Sci-Hub is giving us the real deal unlike
| these for-profit publishers.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yup. I don't get that. SciHub doesn't offer counterfeit, it
| offers the actual, real PDFs, grabbed from the publishers' own
| servers.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| they could sneak it in now because it'll get drowned out by all
| the other news, and the applause they get for "cracking down on
| nazis".
|
| but neither are good news for free speech. I'm glad twitter
| purges alt-right and Q accounts but then why use it as an
| opportunity to also silence a platform that is the biggest hit
| since the first time a human rights lawyer uttered "Open Access".
|
| pretty glad I left twitter in 2017. I still read twitter via
| other people's list (those I used to follow) and via searches on
| nitter. If you know a great list you still have _doom scrolling_.
| But the good thing: when I get too angry (or even too much in
| agreement with the OP), there is no way to share it with the
| world. This is both frustrating (in the moment), but literally
| has no downsides. It has never been once that I woke up the next
| morning regretting I hadn 't already shared whatever my opinion
| was on literally any subject earlier.
|
| The same platform shapes news today. Literally any subject there
| are weekly instances where a journo got their story through some
| "influencer or thought leader". Elon Musk tweeted about Signal
| and the number of downloads increase within 1 day five-fold.
| Story is in the NYT and international news. Twitter is a surreal
| place that shapes way too much the news-cycle in partisan ways.
| Everyone complains about news being divisive but forgetting where
| the division comes from - there is simply no way a leftist
| journalist will have many followers from the right and vice
| versa. It's been like this forever but twitter (and all of social
| media) amplified this a million fold. Blame journalism for sure
| but in the same sentence also damn these individuals requesting
| features that "drive engagement". How the actual F should an
| algorithm drive engagement when there is no way of really telling
| what that engagement will cause. Twitter judged from history has
| never done the right thing when it could have been up to them.
| They always waited until enough damage had been done to justify
| what should be "ongoing housekeeping".
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1349577579091566592
| [deleted]
| rektide wrote:
| What had Sci-Hub talked about on their feed? Who followed it &
| can report in?
|
| This seems like the ban may well have been because of who Sci-Hub
| is, not what they said. Which is an interesting complication to
| this story of what content/who companies opt to host.
| ehsankia wrote:
| According to the linked article, most of the tweets were about
| open science issue, though a few tweets may have had a link to
| Sci-Hub's website. The latter probably used as an excuse to ban
| them.
|
| I just checked and the pirate bay for example has a perfectly
| fine twitter account with a great handle (@tpb), and their
| profile even links to the website. Not sure if they have any
| tweets linking to their website though.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Meanwhile they're still hosting all sorts of accounts of hackers,
| jail breakers and many people obviously breaking the law.
|
| It's a slippery slope and they've started slipping. Now how do
| you stop?
| bob33212 wrote:
| You can't, someone will always be complaining about "X didn't
| get banned, buy Y did".
|
| The only solution is for Twitter to say "You all are right, our
| moderation policy isn't fair it leans to the left more than the
| right, but we think Twitter is a great product that provides a
| lot of value. If you disagree and want to leave, we understand"
| dylan604 wrote:
| Which is ironic since it is the right that always wants to
| shut down things like art/film/music/etc that they object.
| The gaslighting is ridiculous.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| It is likely not up to Twitter but rather DMCA related.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Then wouldn't it say so?
| noncoml wrote:
| Instead of arguing who, when and why should Twitter ban someone,
| we should be trying to find a way to stop depending on Twitter,
| FB and Google for our voices to be heard.
|
| Banning Trump may seem like a good idea in vacuum, but it's a
| slippery slope. And before you say that the cases are different,
| my point is that it shouldn't be up to Twitter to decide.
|
| By supporting Trump's ban, we support Twitter to be the
| arbitrator of free speech.
|
| We either have to treat Twitter as a private company, they can do
| what even the fuck they want, and hence we shouldn't have any
| saying, or treat it a public utility in which case only a judge
| can decided who gets banned and who doesn't
|
| We cannot have it both ways, based on what we thing suits better
| our believes at the time.
| splistud wrote:
| They are a public company (private in the sense I know you mean
| it) and should be treated as such.
|
| They are a public company that publishes certain opinions by
| allowing individuals who are willing to espouse those opinions
| access, while not allowing others.
|
| They are a public company that blocks other opinions from being
| heard (on other platforms) in association with other technology
| giants, by removing the ability for other private or public
| corps any access to meaningful internet services unless they do
| not stay in the opinion lanes the giants are comfortable with.
|
| They are a public company that is using their position and
| status to shape public discourse in the United States, and they
| should absolutely be treated as such. Here's hoping.
| Funes- wrote:
| It's funny. If a direct popular vote was held on making publicly-
| funded research freely available, it would pass by a staggering
| margin. Yet here we are, many easily-solvable issues ignored by
| government officials later, pretending representative democracy
| is a valid form of democracy.
| swebs wrote:
| If a direct popular vote was held promising voters $100,000, it
| would also pass by a huge margin. Probably every year.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Twitter has no business inserting itself into a dispute between
| Elbakyan and Elsevier et al. Few people would have issues if
| Twitter shut down the Sci-Hub account after they received a valid
| court order, but a private monopolist cannot be trusted to be the
| arbiter of what is permitted speech.
| burtonator wrote:
| Twitter did NOTHING as Trump basically spend the last 4 year
| inciting a mob on their platform, threatening people, and
| committing HUNDREDS of violations that would get you and I
| kicked off.
|
| THEN ... when there is a literal armed insurrection against the
| capital where TWO police officers died and 5 people total, and
| they had pipe bombs and hand cuffs to kidnap people, they
| waited until FRIDAY after the markets closed to ban Trump from
| the platform.
|
| Twitter's behavior in this entire thing is beyond unacceptable
| and borders on treasonous.
|
| I really think everyone needs to be calling for @jack to
| resign.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I disagree, they should have purged Elsevier.
| mc32 wrote:
| I know you're being cheeky. But honestly no. People and
| entities should be allowed opinions no matter how we
| disagree, so long as it's not outright violent or otherwise
| violating local laws.
| mc32 wrote:
| Agree.
|
| They're not violating copyright via Twitter. They should have a
| voice via Twitter, no matter the accusation.
|
| Do accused murderers [as opposed to convicted] get their
| Twitter suspended?
|
| This is ridiculous.
| kennywinker wrote:
| For that matter, should convicted murderers get their
| accounts suspended? I think not solely on the grounds that
| they've committed murder - but maybe if they are using their
| platform to cause further harm.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > For that matter, should convicted murderers get their
| accounts suspended? I think not solely on the grounds that
| they've committed murder - but maybe if they are using
| their platform to cause further harm.
|
| On a related note, Facebook policy bans sex offenders from
| having accounts at all, regardless of what they do with
| them:
|
| https://www.facebook.com/help/210081519032737:
|
| > Convicted sex offenders aren't allowed to use Facebook.
| If you've seen an account that may belong to a convicted
| sex offender, please report it to us.
|
| Not sure about the other social media networks.
| kristofferR wrote:
| That's pretty messed up. You as a 14 year old send a nude
| picture to your 15 year old boyfriend and suddenly you're
| banned from Facebook from life?
|
| Frankly the whole situation in the US is messed up,
| punishment should be limited to whatever the court
| decides.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > That's pretty messed up. You as a 14 year old send a
| nude picture to your 15 year old boyfriend and suddenly
| you're banned from Facebook from life?
|
| It's worth noting that is _far_ from the typical case of
| "being a sex offender."
| paul_f wrote:
| No, more typical is a 22yo taking a pee against an alley
| wall behind the bar and being arrested for indecent
| exposure. Calling everyone a sex-offender just makes this
| a useless morass.
| mc32 wrote:
| What about the homeless.
|
| That's gotten out of hand. I understand they want to
| discourage streakers and guys who flip open their
| raincoats or whatever, but someone who looks for a dark
| corner to pee is no where near being a sex offender.
| That's a travesty.
| skissane wrote:
| Even more messed up is the fact that some jurisdictions
| will criminally prosecute 14 year olds for sending nude
| pictures of themselves.
|
| (I do think 14 year olds should be discouraged from
| taking and sending nude pictures of themselves - it is
| the sort of thing they could easily come to regret in a
| few more years - but I don't think criminal prosecution
| is an ethical way of providing that discouragement.)
| Fnoord wrote:
| I don't know.
|
| Receiver could delete picture ASAP, and discourage
| behavior. If they keep, spread, or encourage they're
| complicit. Of course, there's a difference in severity
| between 1 nude of 1 person, or a myriad, or being an
| adult with a myriad.
|
| Sender getting prosecuted for spreading their own nude as
| minor might be weird, but also makes sense. Its not as if
| they'd be a registered sex offender as a minor.
|
| Put this way: what if it was an illegal firearm? We can't
| just turn a blind eye to youth breaking law, but we can't
| treat them like adults either. There's a solid middle
| ground: hold parents accountable till teenager, then
| both, and at age 16 the teenager but not with fully
| implemented adult law. Interestingly, that's approx how
| countries deal with it, or variants of that at least.
|
| TL;DR if properly nuanced, we can deal with issues like
| these, though we may disagree on these nuances, I'm quite
| sure we'll agree on the outliers.
| skissane wrote:
| > Sender getting prosecuted for spreading their own nude
| as minor might be weird, but also makes sense.
|
| I think the state of Victoria, Australia gets it more or
| less right - section 51M of the Crimes Act 1958 [0] makes
| it explicitly legal for children to produce, possess or
| distribute images of themselves. Adults (and in some
| cases other children) can still be prosecuted if they
| encourage/entice/etc the child to do it, but the child
| themselves commits no crime.
|
| > Put this way: what if it was an illegal firearm?
|
| A fifteen year old who takes a picture of themselves
| naked, the primary risk of harm is to themselves, and the
| harm they are risking is psychosocial rather than
| physical. By contrast, a fifteen year old with an illegal
| firearm easily poses a risk of death or physical injury,
| not just to themselves, but also to others. Hence,
| criminally prosecuting the later is far easier to morally
| justify than criminally prosecuting the former. The
| situations aren't really comparable.
|
| > We can't just turn a blind eye to youth breaking law
|
| Well, like Victoria has done, the law can be changed so
| that they aren't breaking it.
|
| [0] http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/vic/consol_act
| /ca1958...
| mc32 wrote:
| Yeah I don't know the ins and outs of that. I only made a
| difference because felons lose rights in the penitentiary,
| but then again most who can are able to commercialize their
| stories, though sometimes the state steps in and diverts
| proceeds to victims, etc.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| at the end of the day twitter has the right to close whatever
| account they so choose
| mc32 wrote:
| Legally, yes. But given the prominence and importance it
| has with regards to disseminating news and opinion, I think
| it's their responsibility to take their obligation
| seriously.
|
| The phones at one time we're not "utilities". Social media
| may become the next regulated utility given its importance.
| ballenf wrote:
| Yes, and people have to right to tell random strangers to
| fuck off and give kids the middle finger.
|
| Doesn't mean we can't try to talk someone out of doing that
| or discuss how such behavior makes society slightly worse.
| jjk166 wrote:
| They also have the legal right to modify everyone's tweets
| to be quotes from mein kampf. That they have the right to
| do something doesn't mean they should do it nor that they
| should be immune to criticism for doing it.
| beebmam wrote:
| Why should we FORCE twitter to publish the speech of someone
| they don't want to publish? Doesn't that itself infringe on
| free speech?
| kypro wrote:
| We probably shouldn't (perhaps with the exception of
| politicians or key public figures), but we should still
| recognise this is a move that has net-negative effect for
| humanity - and a move that Twitter didn't have to make.
|
| We can recognise things as being wrong even if they're not
| illegal.
| adolph wrote:
| Trump violated the First Amendment when he blocked certain
| Twitter users
|
| https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/739906562/u-s-appeals-
| court-r...
| apple_innocent wrote:
| These massive websites/broadcast SMS cannot have it both ways.
|
| They cannot seek the protections of being "critical
| infrastructure" of any sort, common carrier, public forum, etc.
| and then, at the same time, disable user accounts for any
| reason just like any other private website.
|
| They have to pick one or the other. The arguments I am seeing
| online are folks who have chosen one or the other and are
| arguing from their chosen perspective. For example, I am
| content to see them as just another handful of private
| websites, no matter how large they have become.
|
| Meanwhile, the companies themselves, like Twitter, are content
| to bask in this ambiguity instead of clarifying what they are
| or intend to be.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| It all boils down to this:
|
| a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm
| twitter?
|
| If yes: b) Who decides which accounts harm twitter? If the
| answer is "twitter", then they have effectively the right to
| terminate any account at their will. I don't know what other
| answer is possible for b) except maybe "the courts", and I'm
| not sure I like that one.
|
| If the answer to a) is no, for which companies does this apply?
| Must every company work with every potential customer? Who
| decides which companies must?
|
| Going through the options, I only see viable: twitter can ban
| whomever they like, for whatever reason, except for the usual
| exceptions (religion, race etc).
|
| I wish they wouldn't though.
| roenxi wrote:
| > a) Should twitter be allowed to cancel accounts who harm
| twitter?
|
| Although some people agree that is the question, it is not
| the fundamental one here. Most of the respectable arguments
| are that Twitter's bans are senselessly harming Twitter.
| They're building a gaping hole in their offering that a
| competitor can cover.
| lliamander wrote:
| The thing is, few other companies will do business with
| anyone trying to compete with Twitter. Parler was nuked.
| Gab was almost nuked, but they've managed to survive.
|
| There's a huge demand for alternatives to Twitter, but
| other major tech companies, the corporate press, and many
| politicians are doing everything in their power to crush
| those alternatives and prevent them from springing up.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >few other companies will do business with anyone trying
| to compete with Twitter.
|
| That's because companies don't want associated with the
| users on those platforms, many of whom left Twitter
| because twitter didn't want them either.
|
| So businesses aren't simply in some evil cahoots with
| Twitter. They're associated with Twitter because that the
| users they do want to associate with.
| beowulfey wrote:
| Huge demand is maybe an overstatement. A quick google
| search shows me that Parler had ~4 million active users a
| couple weeks ago. Twitter has >300 million. That's about
| 1-2%. I don't think that qualifies as huge.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Twitter doesn't compete in a free market segment. No
| upstart is going to come along and beat Twitter because
| they monopolize users' access to their own social networks
| (if you want to participate in conversations your friends
| are having, you can't do so from e.g. Mastodon because your
| friends almost certainly aren't on Mastodon).
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| If Twitter were just a few million users or something, I'd
| subscribe to the "they're a private entity, let them do what
| they want", but they monopolize a huge portion of our
| national (indeed, international) dialogue to the effect that
| they can unilaterally influence election outcomes for the
| world's most powerful democracies (at least that's the
| implication if you subscribe to the 'Russia manipulated
| Twitter algos in 2016' theory). Unless Twitter's monopoly is
| broken, content on Twitter (and other monopolistic social
| media networks) should be regulated as "free speech".
| jjk166 wrote:
| Just because you have the legal right to do something doesn't
| mean you should do it or that you should be immune to
| criticism for doing it.
|
| For example, in an at-will employment state, an employer can
| legally fire you for looking at them funny. No one would
| argue that an employer shouldn't have the right to terminate
| an employee if they were bad for the company, nor would
| anyone object to the employer being able to determine what is
| good or bad for the company. Nevertheless, such an act is a
| dick move and the employer should be heavily criticized for
| doing it.
| lliamander wrote:
| > twitter can ban whomever they like, for whatever reason,
| except for the usual exceptions (religion, race etc).
|
| I think we either need to get rid of those exceptions or add
| more. I'm not sure which.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Why would those even be exceptions or treated differently.
|
| I find it a rather arbitrary standard I so often encounter.
|
| How would banning for religion be different than banning
| for any other opinion? So long as an opinion asserts the
| existence of a higher being it is inviolate? All I need to
| claim to be unbannable for saying that vaccines cause
| cancer is simply add "This was told to me by the almighty
| creator Zefron of Zefronism" and that small differences
| turns an ordinary falsehood into a religion?
|
| Can I deny the holocaust in Germany by simply making it a
| tenant of a religion?
|
| It seems awfully arbitrary to me.
| bgilroy26 wrote:
| Before the movement of peoples accelerated greatly in the
| mid 20th century, identity was determined by a few
| factors and they were practically constitutive of who
| people _were_
|
| Think about the adhoc communal living options that are
| available to people who want to live in intentional
| community in SF, consider side by side people like
| conservative Mennonite churchgoers in rural Illinois.
|
| The idea is not that anyone can or should pull an L Ron,
| the point is that those identity factors are more or less
| taken to be extraneous of someone's behavior
|
| They are default bad reasons to ban someone, not an
| exhaustive list, just good rules of thumb
| skissane wrote:
| > If the answer to a) is no, for which companies does this
| apply? Must every company work with every potential customer?
| Who decides which companies must?
|
| Regulated public utilities generally speaking can't just drop
| customers simply because they feel like it or don't like them
| or view them as a "threat". Thankfully the electricity
| company can't just disconnect you because they don't like
| you. So long as you pay the bills, they have to keep you on
| as customer. (I think they can disconnect you if you violate
| technical rules about electrical safety, such as trying to
| draw more power from the network than your connection is
| authorised - but they can't simply do it because they
| disagree with your politics, or because you are charged with
| a crime no matter how heinous, or because some third party is
| suing you, or so on.)
|
| And there is an argument for regulating Twitter/Facebook/etc
| as public utilities.
|
| A lot of people in Australia's conservative ruling party are
| pretty upset at Twitter. They were asking Twitter to take
| down a faked image of an Australian soldier slitting a
| child's throat which was posted by the Chinese government.
| Twitter refused. Then Twitter banned Donald Trump. Twitter
| will argue that the two situations were very different, but a
| number of conservative Australian politicians don't agree.
| They are calling for government regulations to control when
| Twitter can remove content or ban people [0]. Effectively,
| turning it into a regulated public utility, at least in
| Australia. (If the Australian government goes ahead with
| this, I can't see any way out of it for Twitter except to
| either comply or block everyone in Australia from accessing
| their service.)
|
| [0] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/threat-to-
| democracy-...
| vimy wrote:
| > They are calling for government regulations to control
| when Twitter can remove content or ban people [0].
| Effectively, turning it into a regulated public utility, at
| least in Australia.
|
| Poland will do the same.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Twitter is enforcing DMCA.
| buzzerbetrayed wrote:
| No, they aren't. They're not violating copyright via Twitter
| devwastaken wrote:
| You don't want to get to the point of a court order. Expecting
| twitter to defend you when you're committing copyright
| infringement is ridiculous. They don't have to do it only when
| the platform is used for direct infringement, they remove the
| account _before_ they can do that and _before_ the legal
| problems.
|
| This isn't about speech, it's copyright infringement.
| djrogers wrote:
| > This isn't about speech, it's copyright infringement.
|
| Are they committing copyright infringement on Twitter?
| devwastaken wrote:
| They're an organization who's purpose is to commit
| copyright infringement. They don't have to be doing the
| infringement on twitter itself for twitter to reasonably
| suspend them. Again, they suspend them to _prevent_ the
| platform being inevitably used for direct infringement or
| to be used as a guide on where /how to participate in the
| infringement.
|
| Twitter may not be responsible for user content as per
| section 230 but it's also not a good idea as a company to
| step on the toes of intellectual property holders without
| good reason.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Does Twitter automatically ban everyone using the hashtag
| #CanHasPDF? That's how scientific papers were spread
| before SciHub; what Elbakyan did was to move the
| copyright infringement off Twitter and to a dedicated
| service.
| bananabreakfast wrote:
| In what world is Twitter a monopoly?
|
| Its market cap is $36B. That's 2X less than Snap and 20X less
| than Facebook.
| offby37years wrote:
| It is a communication monopoly.
| undersuit wrote:
| It's a monopoly on social graphs. I don't want to
| rediscover and invite my friends everytime I start a new
| account on another service.
| jfrankamp wrote:
| I can access whitehouse.gov (or sci hub). The former is
| there explicitly to communicate the to the public the ideas
| and words of the occupant of the White House. Why do people
| keep saying monopoly when there are clear alternatives that
| aren't moderated through a private site/service?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| It's crazy isn't it? This community thinks Apple and Google
| are monopolies despite being competitors, ditto Twitter and
| Facebook.
|
| Microsoft isn't though. Not because they don't completely own
| the Desktop PC market just as they ever did, but because that
| market is less relevant than it used to be for web devs.
|
| I live in a strange time.
| missosoup wrote:
| They are monopolies within a set of respective
| markets/niches when it comes to speech platforms.
|
| GP's point was that private individuals have the power to
| arbitrarily deplatform speech they don't like, no court
| order required. The counter argument is 'go find another
| speech platform', but it doesn't work, because speech
| platforms have been monopolised by a single-digit handful
| of individuals.
| maximente wrote:
| i think there may be some conflating of "very powerful"
| (?) with monopoly here.
|
| it does not take much effort to realize that twitter is
| not a monopoly in the space of speech platforms. it's not
| clear to me that twitter is particularly unique as a
| speech platform: blogs minimally could serve this role,
| as could mastodon. more controversially perhaps:
| facebook/instagram.
|
| contrast that with a situation where you literally
| /cannot/ get utilities delivered to your house because
| the utility company doesn't like you: seems like a fairly
| stark difference to me.
| missosoup wrote:
| This is a logical fallacy and the equivalent of saying
| 'you are welcome to practice free speech, in this here
| sound-proofed room'.
|
| Twitter is one of a small handful of platforms where an
| individual can share an idea and have that idea spread -
| as long as the owners of Twitter don't disagree with that
| idea. It's not because twitter is special, it's because
| it was one of the first to achieve a sufficiently large
| userbase.
|
| Defending arbitrary censorship on these platforms as 'oh
| well it's a private entity so they can do what they like'
| misses the forest for the trees. Technology has shifted
| the power balance for free expression, and applying pre-
| technology laws and mindsets to it just empowers that
| small handful of individuals to manipulate public
| discourse even more. Twitter doesn't quite have a
| monopoly on speech, but it's damn close in terms of
| practical outcomes. The fact that the legal definition of
| `monopoly` hasn't caught up with that, doesn't change the
| matter.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > This is a logical fallacy and the equivalent of saying
| 'you are welcome to practice free speech, in this here
| sound-proofed room'.
|
| No, it's saying you're welcome to practice free speech,
| you just can't borrow my megaphone to do it.
|
| How hard is this to understand? You are not entitled to
| use other people's property without their consent.
|
| If twitter was actually the only way to communicate with
| people on the internet you might have a case, but that is
| completely, ridiculously, absurdly not true.
| MikeUt wrote:
| You live in a town with no fresh water, and the only drinks
| available are sold by the local store. This store does not
| sell bottled water, wine, orange juice, milk, or tea. The
| _only_ drinks it sells are Coca-Cola and Pepsi. But if you
| don 't like Coca-Cola, just buy Pepsi - how silly it would
| be to complain of monopoly when you still have a choice!
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Who is Twitter in your analogy?
|
| The store? Then your analogy is flawed because there are
| other big stores that sell basically the same stuff and
| even some small shops. Not a monopoly. If all of them
| choose not to sell that product that doesn't mean
| anything. They don't have any obligation to carry
| whatever you want.
|
| Man, people are being absurd about this whole thing.
| MikeUt wrote:
| The analogy is flawed. Saying there are no monopoly
| issues as long as there are at least two competitors is
| even more flawed.
|
| If major cinema chains (Twitter, Facebook..) refuse to
| show a movie, but you can still rent the back of Moe's
| bar (and thousands bars like it) and use their second-
| hand projector (an analogy for the small audience of
| alternative platforms).
|
| How successful will such movies be? Should we be
| concerned that the cinema chains can decide what sort of
| movies can be made or have any sort of impact?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > The analogy is flawed. Saying there are no monopoly
| issues as long as there are at least two competitors is
| even more flawed.
|
| There are significantly more than two companies that
| allow mass communication over the internet. In fact,
| there are a significant number of perfectly free and open
| ways to communicate over the internet.
|
| Why is Twitter special?
|
| > If major cinema chains (Twitter, Facebook..) refuse to
| show a movie, but you can still rent the back of Moe's
| bar (and thousands bars like it) and use their second-
| hand projector (an analogy for the small audience of
| alternative platforms). How successful will such movies
| be?
|
| Sorta my point, because that happens _all the time_. No
| one goes around saying theater chains are monopolies and
| need to show every movie anyone deigns to have projected
| on a screen.
|
| > Should we be concerned that the cinema chains can
| decide what sort of movies can be made or have any sort
| of impact?
|
| Maybe, but that isn't legal standing for doing anything.
| If you don't like it, boycott theaters, tell your friends
| not to go to them, promote alternatives that deliver what
| you want.
|
| Oh, but then the market might disagree with you and keep
| going to the theaters anyway. Well tough. You're not
| entitled to force people to care.
|
| Alternatively, push for legislation around online
| communication platforms and how they are allowed to
| determine who can and cannot speak on them. But then
| don't be surprised when those rules apply to your mailing
| list too.
| spoonjim wrote:
| What's your opinion on their takedown of @realDonaldTrump?
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| The same. If he is seditious you can get a court to issue an
| injunction very quickly, and if he isn't a private entity has
| no issue determining what a politician can say.
|
| As a German one thinks different about free speech than do
| most Americans. We know all too well where too much free
| speech leads and when in doubt let the courts decide because
| we love public peace.
|
| Putting a muzzle on someone is interfering with political
| expression, which is a constitutional right. A monopolist
| like Twitter has no business interpreting the constitution,
| the issue would have to see its day in court.
| Solocomplex wrote:
| His speech has not been restricted in any real way. He can
| call a press conference and communicate with every American
| within minutes.
| speeder wrote:
| I am not from US, but would like to point you are wrong
| about that.
|
| He can call a conference, but the press is not obliged to
| show up.
|
| https://variety.com/2017/tv/news/cnn-white-house-press-
| confe...
|
| And since that in 2017, when they figured they could skip
| his press conferences, it has becoming more and more
| normal, if I remember correctly he announced a press
| conference only some days ago and it was ignored by
| almost all major media corporations with a few exceptions
| (Fox for example aired him).
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Good for them, no point going to a press conference where
| a rude orange man just insults you screaming Lugenpresse.
|
| I don't think I'm the only one who switches channels
| whenever that man is on.
| totalZero wrote:
| All Trump has to do in order to gain a press audience is
| pause while walking to his helicopter.
|
| Your link says that one agency (CNN) declined to
| broadcast one press conference. What about all the other
| statements and speeches? What about all the other media
| outlets?
| gabereiser wrote:
| Rightfully so. A free press is at the core of America's
| values. Free thinking, free to ask questions, free to
| investigate. If an administration wants to deny the
| press, blast them as fakes, ignore their questions,
| personally attack journalists, then I'm all for those
| journalists to skip whatever he has to say.
| beart wrote:
| The lack of press coverage of the Trump Administration
| may also be attributed to the administration reducing the
| frequency and value of press briefings. This is an
| article from 2018 and I would put money on it having only
| gotten worse since.
|
| https://qz.com/1503024/2018-was-the-year-the-white-house-
| pre...
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| He can publish video or any content he wants on
| whitehouse.gov; I'm sure he would get millions of views
| overnight.
| franklampard wrote:
| The White House needs to build a healthy relationship
| with the press.
|
| Why would you expect them to come the moment you want
| them after blasting them as fake news, and kicking them
| out when you dislike their questions?
| colpabar wrote:
| People keep saying this, but how would that work? We've
| seen major broadcasting networks refuse to air his press
| conferences before. Aren't most big platforms with the
| ability to reach "every American" private companies that
| can do the same?
|
| This is a genuine question - I do not watch a lot of
| news. Is there a government owned platform that I don't
| know about? I just looked into CSPAN a bit and it is a
| private organization, so couldn't they also just decide
| to not air things?
|
| edit: I am referring to the claim that "He can call a
| press conference and communicate with every American
| within minutes." How?
| bnj wrote:
| Are presidents entitled to be broadcast on private
| networks?
| tyre wrote:
| You seem to conflate the right to speech with the right
| to be heard.
|
| No one in America has the latter.
| oneplane wrote:
| While those might be private companies and therefore not
| required to air anything from anyone, the same goes for
| the people that would watch/read it: even if someone were
| to post something on twitter, nobody is required to then
| actually read it.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Any company can ban anyone from their platform if they
| violate their ToS.
|
| If you don't agree, then you can go to court.
|
| Eg. Otherwise Twitter would have to go to court to remove
| potential bots. Which would result in millions of lawsuits
| across countries.
|
| That's not realistic
| sitkack wrote:
| As an American, I respect the German perspective on what
| these liberties mean to civilization. We cannot bend the
| protections based on our personal beliefs. The structure
| and what it protects is more important than the specific
| case. When we subvert it, even from righteous causes, we
| break the system for everyone.
| Shivetya wrote:
| Well the one lie we like to tell ourselves (I am an
| American) is that if Twitter/Facebook/Amazon/Google takes
| action against someone we don't like we don't run afoul of
| pesky First Amendment and other issues.
|
| However we are fooling ourselves because these companies
| very much are bending to political pressure and acting on
| the behalf of that. You can pretty much try to throw up all
| the exceptions to that claim you want but in the end you a
| few issues which show it, first being they don't want to
| invite further regulatory control over their industry,
| second they don't want legal liability for actions of those
| who use their platforms, third they respond to the whims of
| their management and to a certain point their employees on
| who they let use their systems.
|
| People must recognize that politicians exert undo influence
| over all businesses simply because they can change the law
| and regulatory structure they operate under. It easily
| explains why so many politicians move into cushy business
| jobs in not slot their friends and family into the same.
| Its the cost of doing business. Established political
| players simply have too much power.
| vladTheInhaler wrote:
| > If he is seditious you can get a court to issue an
| injunction very quickly
|
| Maybe courts work differently in Germany, but one word I
| would absolutely never use to describe them is "quick".
|
| Furthermore, courts in the US tend to be extremely
| skeptical of what is called "prior restrain". And
| describing what ought to be proscribed is especially
| complicated by Trumps use of innuendo and circumspection.
| He almost never says _anything_ directly, even when it 's
| pretty much apolitical - see for instance him explaining
| what Uranium is:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCnKtzQpCSs
| SllX wrote:
| Well our laws and legal traditions are a bit different than
| Germany's Basic Law and Burgerliches Gesetzbuch.
|
| In our case Twitter's private property rights trump the
| President's rights. The President is the President and the
| President can always get a message out _if he wants_ ;
| Twitter on the other hand is not obligated to serve as a
| medium of Government communications and if they had IP
| banned the White House and Capitol at any point in their
| history, and maybe IP banned the equivalents in other
| countries, who would be able to say they couldn't?
| fastball wrote:
| Yes, but I think the problem is more that we have a
| massively connected society but are relying on the good
| will of corporations to provide that connectivity.
| SllX wrote:
| Part of life is that unless you live miles from others
| and hunt, forage and fish, you are pretty much always
| relying on the goodwill of others. I don't want to start
| designating some corporations as special just because we
| happen to like their service a lot, and part of just how
| unspecial they are is they remain mere private entities
| carrying out their own activities including enforcing
| their own property rights.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Repubs always hated public broadcasting, championing the
| free market to take care of journalism. Companies think
| Trump is toxic for their brand- surprised pikachu.
| fastball wrote:
| I'm not really championing public broadcasting here
| either.
|
| But in an internet-enabled world, in a country that
| values the right to free speech, there should be wholly
| unbiased platform that allows anyone to promote their
| speech to anyone else who wants to listen, as long as it
| is not speech that is already considered illegal (as
| decided by the courts, not unnamed corporate arbiters of
| truth).
|
| People keep making the argument that "free speech isn't
| the same as right to have a platform / be signal boosted"
| or whatever, and I think that was true in the past. When
| the most you could do to broadcast was stand on the
| street corner and yell out your speech, that idea
| applied. But in this day and age, information flow is so
| strong that someone who has their broadcasting ability
| cut off effectively has their speech cut off.
|
| Imagine trying to exercise your free speech in a world
| where, whenever you tried to say something, there was
| someone there to just yell 1000x louder than you so that
| you were totally drowned out. In a world where so much of
| our communication is happening over internet channels,
| this is essentially what we're talking about when we
| "deplatform" someone.
| shuntress wrote:
| It is still possible to register a domain name, run a web
| host, and present your speech to the unbiased, (nearly)
| global, public internet.
|
| If you will indulge a bit of doomsaying, three recent
| trends should be more worrying to you:
|
| - The current administration's actions against net
| neutrality
|
| - ISP terms of use clauses against running any kind of
| server on "residential" connections
|
| - "unlimited [insert streaming service] included!" data
| plans
|
| Debate over where twitter should ban any users is
| wasteful bike-shedding in the conversation around modern
| communication.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Are you familiar with the comedy of horrors that late
| night public access broadcast was? Not saying it
| shouldn't be done, but let's set realistic expectations:
| nobody is going to want to use a government website to
| exercise their speech, especially because of the types of
| speech it will be used by. (Unappealing, basically.)
| michaelmior wrote:
| Why would Twitter request a court to issue an injunction to
| remove him from the platform that they own and control?
| They're fully able to do some without an injunction so I'm
| not sure any court would even deal with the case. IANAL
| wutbrodo wrote:
| It's not about Twitter's ability to ban users it's about
| enabling them avoid a substantial expansion of their
| moderation responsibilities. Twitter considers it a
| positive thing to have transparent and relatively
| equitably-applied rules, and this is an obvious positive
| for its users, and society in general (given how central
| Twitter has become to national discourse). Capricious
| one-off expansions that are difficult to justify
| generally (or that would require massive increases in
| moderation that pretty much everyone would hate) are the
| last thing Twitter wants.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Twitter is not a monopoly by any stretch. Regulating how
| sites handle speech just adds an additional hurdle for new,
| better platforms to enter. I should not have to have an
| expensive lawyer on retainer to read injunction requests
| just for running a <$2/month IRC server because some random
| important/popular people decided to use publish their
| manifesto on it.
|
| This has already been tested in court in the Prager
| University vs Google, LLC [1] trial and was resolved very
| quickly. Freedom of speech does not mean another individual
| has to assist you in publishing or advertising your speech.
| You are free to shout from a soap box but no one has to
| provide you that soap box.
|
| I really think people over emphasize the power that social
| media sites have. They own a lot of eyeball market share
| but they do not have the power to prevent you from
| publishing your opinions. Anyone can make their own
| website, their own Mastadon instance (see Gab if you want
| proof), their own Peertube instance, a lot of work is done
| by the open source community to make it easy to publish
| content not reliant on large corporations.
| totalZero wrote:
| > Twitter is not a monopoly by any stretch.
|
| Considering that Parler was curbstomped by
| Google/Apple/AWS last week, it's safe to say that Twitter
| doesn't operate in a naturally competitive market.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| Parlor was incredibly lazy and opportunistic. The massive
| data leak and slamming by one of the most notorious sites
| on the internet, The Pirate Bay, suggests strongly that
| Parlor was not pursued in the most competent manor. [1]
| [2]
|
| There are dozens of webhosts other than Google/Apple/AWS
| and plenty of ways to collocate directly. Even if you
| wanted to host something no provider could touch, you
| could publish a front
|
| Picking some of the most recognizable and PR influenced
| companies in the world to host your _publicly_ and
| _deliberately_ controversial content is just plain
| stupid. They could have just seen how the pirate bay
| responded and copied them. Heck, since Parlor didn 't
| host anything actually illegal, they could have
| potentially used the .swiss or .ch TLD since Switzerland
| has pretty strong anti-censorship laws.
|
| [1] https://archive.vn/yrlwA [2] https://www.theregister.
| com/2021/01/14/pirate_bay_cofounder_...
| salawat wrote:
| >I really think people over emphasize the power that
| social media sites have.
|
| You say, in the midst of a discussion amongst an
| international userbase on the political ramifications of
| a policy decision.
|
| Let's be real about this. Social media, when you really
| look at it, propagates signal that makes remote events
| local in terms of sphere of influence. Any content can
| touch anyone, the globe over assuming an internet
| connection.
|
| Frankly, and I apologize if this is out of turn, but I
| think you underestimate the power behind choosing what
| conversations won't take place.
|
| Just look at the big difference that a U.S. Senate
| Majority leader can have in terms of the realistic chance
| of something being discussed.
|
| Never, ever, underestimate the power of negation or
| deprioritization. In fact, it's a little funny, because
| being in the position to make those decisions at all is
| really the common definition of power/authority.
| ravenstine wrote:
| They're not a monopoly in the strictest sense, but they
| are extremely powerful. People go to Twitter to see what
| their representatives are saying. Journalists use it
| almost exclusively to discover what's relevant. Yes,
| they're a private company, but when a private company
| reaches a certain level of influence they become a
| _government_ of sorts, just not one that owns a standing
| army.
|
| I think you underestimate the power that social media
| has. The mass 80% doesn't give a fuck about Mastodon or
| even _leave_ the domains of Facebook, Google, Twitter,
| and Amazon. This isn 't the year 2004 - getting anyone to
| use a shitty knockoff of Twitter or the like is always
| going to be an uphill battle. It's due to a few things,
| namely an accumulation of wealth and confluence with the
| mainstream media apparatus that wants access to that
| wealth by proxy. Go ahead and make your own competitor to
| Twitter and report back to us in a year. Don't be
| surprised when the MSM labels it in a way that scares off
| the 80-90%.
| [deleted]
| russell_h wrote:
| To be clear, there is no serious interpretation of the US
| Constitution required here: Twitter absolutely has the
| right to determine what shows up on their website. For the
| government to require Twitter to publish the opinions of
| the president would be a very clear violation of Twitter's
| own first amendment rights.
|
| There could be more nuance involved if, for example, there
| were a credible claim of racial discrimination involved,
| but that's obviously not the case here.
| gojomo wrote:
| Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey has repeatedly been summoned
| before Congress to be dressed-down by legislators, who
| regularly threaten to "do something" that increases
| Twitter's liabilities or otherwise encumbers their
| business, if Twitter doesn't change their internal
| policies. In some cases, it's been suggested that
| discretionary government powers under existing laws could
| be used to reward or punish Twitter. Twitter's been the
| topic of executive orders & criticism from the FCC chair.
|
| If Twitter'd been left to do anything it thought legal
| and wise, and only challenged via formal lawsuits or
| prosecutions that courts could rule on, then sure,
| Twitter can do whatever they want.
|
| But now that politicians, elected officeholders, &
| appointed regulators have all piled-on with their
| opinions of what Twitter should do, "or else", might
| there be some government-restricting-expression issues to
| consider? Is it a coincidence that they only took strong
| action against Trump once he became a "lame duck", and
| the action they took will specifically please the
| incoming administrations' coalition?
|
| Has the government found the perfect 1st Amendment
| loophole, by laundering their speech-restricting
| preferences through threats - "because of the
| implication" - while maintaining a facade of non-
| involvement in this "private" decision?
| tpmx wrote:
| I wonder how he has handled the shutdowns, at a personal
| level (photo from november):
|
| https://nypost.com/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/jack-d...
| splistud wrote:
| Twitter also has the right to avoid scrutiny as a
| publisher by being a public forum. They are not acting as
| a public forum, however. This isn't going to be
| straightforward. Laws (or regullations), or Twitter's
| behavior, will have to change.
| Terretta wrote:
| Agree with how you put this.
|
| Just a reminder to readers that the First Amendment
| prevents govt (Congress, and the States) from making laws
| that abridge freedom of speech.
|
| It governs the government, state actors, not Twitter or
| other private companies or individuals. If you are not a
| state actor and you want to limit speech, go bananas.
|
| For example, think back to the Google memo, and
| misconception of free speech at work. This 2017 article
| calls the misunderstanding "tremendous":
|
| Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-
| leadership/wp/2017/08...
|
| Outlined: https://outline.com/2udPxF
|
| Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20200125155407/http
| s://www.washi...
| this_user wrote:
| The problem with this argument is that it completely
| sidesteps the issue of how much platforms like Twitter
| and FB possess quasi-monopolies in their respective
| niches. In fact, perhaps Twitter's biggest competitor
| just got shut down by Amazon.
|
| This effectively means that we are back to the old days
| of newspapers first, then radio, and finally TV, where a
| small number of media companies control what people read,
| hear, and see. Except, this time the power is
| concentrated in even fewer hands.
|
| This raises the question of whether something should be
| done to turn a service like Twitter into content-agnostic
| platforms that can no longer decide at their own
| discretion what even the world's highest elected
| officials can and cannot say.
| jfrankamp wrote:
| If twitter was hoarding ip addresses so that parlor
| couldn't be hosted, or somehow preventing competitors
| from entering the space... ? I just don't see it. DT
| could put together one of the most popular websites on
| the internet in a day or two if he put a single user
| microblog up. All the media would eat it up. Better pick
| a swiss host though!
| spoonjim wrote:
| Twitter isn't deciding what Donald Trump says, it's
| deciding what he says on their website.
|
| I wouldn't allow Donald Trump to give a speech from my
| backyard -- that's not an impingement on his rights.
| fjabre wrote:
| I absolutely agree with this line of reasoning. Thank you.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| (Not the OP) I would prefer that Twitter did it in response
| to a court order. But courts don't seem to be able to act
| fast enough.
| cpursley wrote:
| Which is why we should also get rid of the courts in
| addition to free speech.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Credit card companies managed to do just that.
|
| There is the argument that class actions are preferable
| to Parliament setting laws because courts are more agile,
| setting precedent. So Big Money got in front of that
| through mandatory arbitration. Why that is constitutional
| I couldn't tell. Perhaps it is because Congress is
| corrupt.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Trial by upvotes on /r/publicopinion!
| oneplane wrote:
| I'm not sure why a court would have to 'allow' a company to
| enforce their own terms of service. The other way around
| would work: if a court finds that the terms of service are
| in violation of the law then an action can be reversed and
| terms can be revised.
|
| It seems that courts are now being used as some sort of
| universal arbiter in every disagreement instead of using
| them for what they are for: decide on legal disputes. Not
| ever disagreement is a legal dispute but treating it like
| that makes society brittle and dystopian.
| bioinformatics wrote:
| You missed the worldwide vote for the company that should hold
| the only truths in all matters? Twitter won. Google second and
| FB third.
| dylan604 wrote:
| * Some or all of the content shared in this message is
| disputed and might be misleading
| memer wrote:
| It's Twitter's own servers and they can choose who can use them
| or not. Permitted speech on the legal scope does not matter
| when talking about businesses.
| insickness wrote:
| > "Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more
| an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by
| the public in general, the more do his rights become
| circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of
| those who use it."
|
| This from Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), a case
| decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled
| that a state trespassing statute could not be used to prevent
| the distribution of religious materials on a town's sidewalk,
| even though the sidewalk was part of a privately owned
| company town. The Court based its ruling on the provisions of
| the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama
| tptacek wrote:
| Everything the court has done since Marsh v Alabama has
| walked that decision back, and I think you'll have a hard
| time finding legal experts to back the interpretation that
| Twitter owns the obligations of a public square.
|
| We've had threads about it on HN, but it's also (for
| obvious reasons) come up recently, and here's Ken White
| citing a recent SCOTUS decision knocking this idea down:
|
| https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1141766582382678016
|
| (The whole thread is good).
| sthnblllII wrote:
| Laws can, do and need to change as technology changes the
| political reality. No one elected twitter. Building a
| pretty website should not give a private entity the power
| to control political speech.
| tptacek wrote:
| I was going to rebut this, but thought better of it. My
| point is just, there's not much you can do with the
| jurisprudence as it exists, despite what you might think
| _Marsh_ means.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| There's another thing that I think is often glossed over
| in discussions of Marsh v. Alabama (I'm not a lawyer
| though, and Ken is probably smarter than me anyhow).
|
| But that is that Marsh v. Alabama had the company wanting
| to use a state law to kick people out (and this was
| repeated with the California case Pruneyard). "The state
| doesn't need to actively help you kick people exercising
| their 1A rights in a place you don't want them to" is
| very, very different from "The state can prevent you from
| exercising your own autonomy to prevent someone from re-
| accessing your property".
|
| If the company town put up a fence and a gate, they
| wouldn't be forced to let anyone in.
| splistud wrote:
| I wholly agree with you. They do, however, own the
| obligations of a public forum if that is how they ask to
| be regulated.
|
| They are playing cute with political speech. They aren't
| publishing in the traditional sense. But heavy curation
| of independent content is (at their volume) publishing -
| without the regulation accorded publishers. They are, by
| their actions, espousing certain political ideas by only
| allowing those ideas to exist in their 'public forum'.
|
| For anyone, even a staunch libertarian, to claim that the
| government should not get in their kitchen on that basis
| is naive in my opinion.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think you'll find a lot of lawyers who specialize
| in speech and 230 that agree with this interpretation
| either, and it would have extremely wide-ranging
| consequences for the entire Internet that the fiercest
| advocates of this position would not like at all.
| splistud wrote:
| I expect that you are correct. However, allowing an org
| to act as a publisher by heavily curating who is allowed
| to use their 'forum' is having wide-ranging consequences
| for our society. As they are occupying a spot in the
| regulatory scheme that they no longer deserve, redressing
| this with regulation is necessary.
| mc32 wrote:
| Isn't there precedent for people being able to speak in
| malls as part of freedom of speech in certain state
| constitutions as a consequence of Pruneyard vs Robbins?
| Karunamon wrote:
| There is, but that case only applies to California (where
| Twitter is HQ'd, fair enough), and I don't think it's
| ever been tested for an online service with a ToS.
| devmunchies wrote:
| Twitter's freedom to boot anyone off their platform doesn't
| mean they are free from consequences.
|
| Same argument used towards hate speech but this is more
| serious IMO because big tech is the new Standard Oil or Big
| Tobacco.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Permitted speech on the legal scope does not matter when
| talking about businesses.
|
| Sure it matters. It matters because a bunch of people want
| businesses to allow all legal speech on their platform.
|
| And this group of people is growing in support, and they
| might eventually get enough support to force these business
| to do so, using legislative changes such as required these
| major companies to follow common carrier laws.
| splistud wrote:
| It also matters in the sense that one can't avoid certain
| regulation by claiming to be a public forum rather than a
| publisher while not being a public forum at all
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I'd argue once X amount of users use your service you are
| sort of public service company already. You can't use "oh we
| are a business so we can do anything we want" to defend
| yourself about that.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| It's a little more subtle than that - more strength of
| network effects than mere number of users - but pretty
| much.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I don't think many are saying Twitter's decision was illegal.
| They're just saying they don't think they should have made
| it.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Yes they can, but they shouldn't.
| john_moscow wrote:
| >It's Twitter's own servers
|
| That are offered to the customers below cost of running them
| in order to stifle competition, which is only possible as
| long as the government antitrust body is looking the other
| way.
| eganist wrote:
| > That are offered to the customers below cost of running
| them in order to stifle competition, which is only possible
| as long as the government antitrust body is looking the
| other way.
|
| Twitter as best as we can tell is not offering services
| below cost to _customers._
|
| The _free users_ are not the _customers._ The _paying
| users_ purchasing ads are using the services to derive
| value from the population of free users on the platform.
|
| If you want to reform this, target how companies convince
| people to give up their data in exchange for functionality
| rather than for money.
| heimatau wrote:
| > Twitter has no business inserting itself into a dispute
| between
|
| @dick said recently in an interview that these are geo-
| political decisions. That they might've did the calculus of
| losing advertising money but it's not the predominate reason
| [1].
|
| [1] - I can't find this source. I find it weird that I can't
| search my history to find it. It was in an interview with
| either Bloomberg or WSJ.
|
| P.S. The interview was in relation to Trump being banned but I
| think his response applies to Sci_Hub because these are
| intentional decisions, not from an AI/automated system.
| john_moscow wrote:
| Twitter is a company. And banning decisions are made by
| specific people in it. And it's not like after banning Trump
| they will happily consider their job done and go stock shelves
| at Walmart for minimum wage. Oh no, they have tasted power and
| they will continue finding new targets because their cushy job
| literally depends on it.
| djrogers wrote:
| And yet there are still accounts for torrent sites (@tpb is alive
| and well last I heard) and other sites that allow for the
| distribution of copyrighted material.
|
| Something is fishy here, and I really really really don't see the
| motivation for Twitter to have done this by itself. If this were
| part of a sweeping crackdown on accounts that promote 'piracy'
| it'd make sense, but it's not.
|
| Feels more like "a board member has a friend who made a phone
| call" kind of thing.
| Triv888 wrote:
| Yeah they really pick and choose what they ban based on
| "personal opinion".
| wolco5 wrote:
| Twitter promoting the open web again.
| [deleted]
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| Twitter is helping the argument that platforms are to be content
| moderators. This kills 230. This will entrench Twitter as one of
| the few social media services capable, due to the need to
| moderate at scale.
| vlmutolo wrote:
| It's funny -- I found this link a few days ago and now it seems
| like it applies here.
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
|
| It's a summary of how section 230 works and is worded. The tone
| of the piece is overly hash and critical of its readers
| (prompting me unnecessarily to write this paragraph), but it
| raises some good points, and I was surprised by more than one
| of the clarifications it made.
|
| Basically, as it applies here, I don't think Twitter moderating
| its content to remove SciHub goes against Section 230. My
| understanding is that it's specifically _covered_ by 230.
| adolph wrote:
| I'm not saying the article is totally wrong, but at least one
| of the studies they linked to is Internet industry funded
| (NetChoice: "Described by Politico as tech's most aggressive
| lobbying presence in Washington D.C."), and authored by one
| "Michael Masnick" which is the same name as the author of the
| Techdirt article and also the name of Techdirt's founder.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techdirt
|
| So, until something is litigated to the point of SCOTUS
| precedent, I think most things are at the level of "that's
| just like, your opinion, man."
| guerrilla wrote:
| Creating a giant barrier to entry for competition?
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| It also shut down the account of the Russian-made vaccine Sputnik
| V today. Seems like they are taking too much upon themselves
| lately, aren't they?
|
| UPD: Access has been restored.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| I just googled it and could open it in Twitter.
| breck wrote:
| It's time. #AbolishCopyright. #AbolishPatents.
| #EndImaginaryPropertyLaws.
| dankboys wrote:
| They're a private company, Sci-Hub has to make their own social
| media service
| rcoveson wrote:
| Can't host it with Google or Amazon, though, as those companies
| are also willing to take you down before any injunction.
|
| DNS providers will also take you out if there's social pressure
| to do so; see the recent GoDaddy action against AR15.com. Not
| sure how you work around that.
|
| As for Internet connection, there was another recent action by
| an ISP which blocked access to Twitter. So you're not
| necessarily safe with your ISP either.
|
| I think the only story I haven't heard yet is a landlord
| evicting its tenants for hosting objectionable content. But
| without any of the above services, it doesn't really matter.
|
| All that said, it's still possible to stay accessible even if
| your content isn't legal. The important point is that legal but
| broadly unacceptable content is _never_ safe. You can be kicked
| out by any provider at any layer, and getting kicked out once
| serves as a signal to all the other providers at that layer
| that they are expected to do the same.
|
| It's kind of like living in a small town 150 years ago. The
| "people" of the town are the few giant service providers in the
| country. It doesn't really matter what the law says, if the
| town consensus is that you are not welcome, then they can make
| it very hard or impossible to live there. They don't need law
| enforcement on their side, they'll run you out all the same.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >It's kind of like living in a small town 150 years ago. The
| "people" of the town are the few giant service providers in
| the country. It doesn't really matter what the law says, if
| the town consensus is that you are not welcome, then they can
| make it very hard or impossible to live there.
|
| And yet an entire town ostracizing someone for a non-
| protected attribute is actually protected speech and behavior
| under the first amendment. If you can't participate in polite
| society, there's very few things the government actually
| guarantees you.
| rcoveson wrote:
| Yes, this is true. I'd also point out that members of
| "polite society" may ostracize you for many reasons,
| including perceived sexual deviancy, punk rock music,
| dancing, any degree of alcohol or drug use, communist
| leanings, anarchist leanings, and more. We just have to
| trust that liberal culture will hold people morally
| accountable for the people they ostracize, and that those
| who are impacted have the means to migrate to more
| accepting towns.
|
| Continuing our analogy, I hope that we use our power to
| ostracize "netizens" very sparingly. And I do mean our
| power, not that of the tech giants, who merely do what they
| believe will be best for their image as decided by us. I
| also hope that there continues to be a competitive
| landscape of online countries, each more liberal or
| authoritarian in its own unique ways, from where differing
| individuals and organizations can connect with the world.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| This point is why I believe DNS, network and colo services
| should only be taken down (for content) by legal order.
|
| Social media is layer 7, I think it needs less regulation in
| that regard. It's like saying "you can't have your business
| in the phone book" vs. "you can't have a phone".
| generalizations wrote:
| I like that analogy.
|
| Also read on here recently that it's super hard to knock
| facebook offline because they own all the pieces, even their
| own domain registrar. Now I've been wondering how hard it is
| to set up my own domain registrar.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Can ICANN or some other body block you if they don't like
| the kind of domains you are registering?
| superkuh wrote:
| Yes, that's a legit option. But it does not mean that what
| twitter has done here is not very, very wrong. So bad in fact
| that individual humans should reflect on it and decide if they
| want to continue supporting twitter themselves by using it.
|
| This is the inevitable end of any popular centralized
| incorporated means of communication.
| Triv888 wrote:
| Twitter is a public company, no?
| Darmody wrote:
| And generate their own power for their own homemade servers.
| tengbretson wrote:
| I'm not very familiar with Sci-Hub, but I doubt they were
| uploading pirated content to be hosted on Twitter, so what would
| their violation be? Incitement to commit copyright violation?
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Ah yes and torrent sites don't host any content either :P
| ska wrote:
| Not really the same thing unless they were linking to
| particular copyright works you could find elsewhere, is it?
| jolmg wrote:
| To see the tweets:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://twitter.com/Sci_Hub
|
| I should donate more to the Internet Archive. I hate how so much
| history can just disappear at a whim if it weren't for them.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| How can you see Tweets there? When I try to open some past
| snapshots, they just render ajaxy "Something went wrong".
|
| (I'm surprised Twitter is archivable in the first place, the
| whole thing being a pile of JS crap.)
| jolmg wrote:
| I see tweets here:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20201225111818/https://twitter.c.
| ..
|
| I use Chromium for this because on Firefox I have the Referer
| header disabled and that causes the WaybackMachine to return
| a 498 HTTP status on an internal API call, but otherwise I
| see no issues.
|
| Images:
|
| https://ibb.co/1mRqyvW
|
| https://ibb.co/F8TbCLv
|
| https://ibb.co/P1xZwZT
|
| > I'm surprised Twitter is archivable in the first place
|
| I'm sure it must have taken some effort by the IA team, but
| Twitter is a pretty important source to archive, so I'm not
| as surprised because of that. They simply rock and can be
| expected of greatness.
|
| The infinite scroll works, but zooming on images doesn't.
| That's a bit of a shame because Twitter clips them, and they
| can sometimes contain important content.
| cwkoss wrote:
| In a just world, any organization which tries to prevent the free
| exchange of scientific information would be dismantled.
| amrrs wrote:
| This is absurd. I'd love to see Twitter shutting down Twitter's
| account because There are lots of Fake News spreading on Twitter!
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| "Fake news" isn't illegal. Piracy is.
| PrefixKitten wrote:
| I find the notion of owning scientific knowledge kind of
| unsettling...
| [deleted]
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| This is because science has yet to prove ownership isn't a
| real concept.
| jtbayly wrote:
| There's plenty of illegal stuff on Twitter, too.
| [deleted]
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Thundering voice from the heavens above: _THOU SHALT NOT
| LIE!_
|
| edit: just cited _THE_ supralegal authority here, regarding
| fake nyuz...
| xamuel wrote:
| It is a common misconception that "Thou shalt not lie" is a
| divine commandment from God. You're probably thinking of
| "Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor"
| (Exodus 20:16), which is more specific.
| pretendscholar wrote:
| I wish I could read ancient aramaic because I'm pretty
| sure they don't literally mean its fine to lie about
| anything that doesn't involve someone living nearby.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| The specifics must have been lost in translation on their
| way to me ;-)
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| You mean, sharing is illegal unless done in a controlled way?
| [deleted]
| 1337biz wrote:
| Great, we need more of that!
|
| With politicans it is easy to hide behind partisan idealogy to
| justify that everything is fine.
|
| The more regular, relatively apolitical accounts are getting
| banned, the more people realize that something is wrong with the
| way Twitter acts.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Twitter flexed, everyone flinched. Expecting more flexing is
| where I am. They say the slippery slope is a fallacy, but I am
| starting to think of that as a reflex saying when someone gets
| caught shoving the Overton Window.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Slippery slope is a fallacy when no evidence that the slope is
| actually slipper is presented. If someone were to, for example,
| highlight unchecked incentives Twitter has to further censor
| then that'd be a valid argument.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Well, the incentive can be as tiny as "I don't like them."
| Recall Cloudflare's CEO waking up "in a bad mood."
| abnry wrote:
| I don't support piracy. So I don't support Sci-hub. But I believe
| that publishers are bilking the public and that publicly funded
| research should be made freely available. The real way to fix
| this is to disrupt the reputational incentives academics (and
| deans supporting this) have to keep publishing in these journals.
| For some reason, I think this is an unpopular opinion on HN.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| As a scientist I can tell you that Sci-hub is critical to the
| progress of humankind. I can't even describe how many times we
| rely on it and how much poorer the world would be without it.
|
| Maybe you should reconsider your position on "piracy" if it
| would lead to a significant slowdown in solving the serious
| challenges that face us in the 21st century.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| I'd say it's the publishers who cause the problem and which
| need to be disrupted. When scientific societies ran most
| publishing, journal prices were quite reasonable.
|
| BTW, you have to thank Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine
| Maxwell and friend of Jeff Epstein for the state of affairs:
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
| natechols wrote:
| The only "disruption" required is for funding agencies,
| especially governments, to mandate immediate open access as a
| condition of grants. Milder approaches such as the NIH's
| current policy have been spectacularly successful, because
| nobody turns down that kind of money. The main problem has been
| intense lobbying by publishers, including some academic
| societies. But open access is not an issue where it should be
| difficult to assemble a large bipartisan coalition in favor,
| even in the US!
| cwkoss wrote:
| For most academic researchers, publishing is a net cost: they
| aren't getting royalties when people pay to read their work.
| "Piracy" of these documents does not deprive the creators of
| anything. The only entities it hurts are the organizations of
| questionable social value who exist by gatekeeping this
| information.
| kumarsw wrote:
| There are legal avenues to do this. We already have Arxiv
| (admittedly not peer reviewed) and I believe that there are
| some open Wikipedia-style journals in the works as well.
| rcoveson wrote:
| It's unpopular because that disruption hasn't happened yet, and
| there's no guarantee that it will happen in the next 50 years.
| In the mean time, the average American is stuck interacting
| with cutting edge research--research which is often _funded
| publicly_ --via:
|
| 1. Shitty science journalism with paywalled citations
|
| 2. $300/yr textbooks
|
| 3. Crime
|
| Intuitively, it's difficult to imagine something _less
| copyrightable_ than a scientific discovery. The world is
| upside-down.
| jjk166 wrote:
| You should support piracy and especially Sci-hub. In bilking
| the public, the publishers restrict access to scientific
| knowledge. This restriction delays and limits progress. While
| any individual hinderance is minor, this is repeated millions
| of times over. The lost progress is lost to you, as much as to
| everyone else. How can anyone support parasites who hurt the
| whole of humanity and don't even have the decency to pay the
| scientists whose work they profit off? Piracy in this case is
| not only acceptable, it is a moral imperative.
| dickbar wrote:
| This move is bold and refreshing. I think Facebook and Amazon
| should also be taking action (assuming sci hub is using AWS and
| people are posting links to it on FB and organizing groups).
|
| It's only fair that, in case of breach of any law, regardless of
| where it comes from, that same measures be applied in each and
| every case.
|
| I'm sure HN would agree given what has transpired over the last
| week.
|
| Edit: I missed to include CloudFlare and others as well. They
| shouldn't be providing DNS services to anyone who is breaking any
| laws.
| jenwkejnwjkef wrote:
| Sci-hub is not breaking any laws. They are accused of breaking
| laws. Who gave Twitter, in your eyes, the power to act as a
| judge?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Judge, jury and executioner at the same time.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| They're private companies, they are not required to uphold the
| law.
|
| We have police and courts which are paid to do that.
|
| I can understand removing content that would make them liable
| in front of a court (as publishers) - anything else they remove
| it's censorship and I don't like it.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Copyright infringement (especially when arguably in the public
| interest, even if illegal) and inciting violence are not even
| close to comparable. Different moral universe. Different legal
| ramifications as well.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-14 23:01 UTC)