[HN Gopher] Using government guidelines to police content: state...
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Using government guidelines to police content: state censorship?
Author : curmudgeon22
Score : 108 points
Date : 2021-07-03 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (taibbi.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (taibbi.substack.com)
| plerpin wrote:
| The thing that really bothers me about Weinstein's approach is
| that, while he and his wife are scientists, they're exceedingly
| quick to assert their hunches as scientific fact. They wear their
| scientist labels on their sleeves but their thinking is far more
| ideological. In a recent podcast about fluoridation in tap water,
| they were talking about how they avoid iodized salt, because
| iodine is a reactive chemical and you don't want to OD on it.
| Ludicrous. You'd sooner die from the sheer quantity of salt you'd
| have to ingest before the iodine even starts to become a problem.
| api wrote:
| It's no different from religious fundamentalists who put their
| own whims and ideologies into God's mouth. They're just
| replacing God with science, but it's the same schtick.
| abnry wrote:
| The thing is, you've had Nobel Prize winners like Linus Pauling
| promote vitamin C as a panacea. Or Dawkins use his biology
| credentials to say something about philosophy/religion.
| Scientists using their credentials to give credence to whatever
| their particular argument in whatever domain is nothing new. In
| fact, it is part of what the Weinstein's general critique of
| the scientific realm is. Perhaps they lack the self-awareness
| to see when they do it themselves, but in my mind, no way are
| you going to somehow paint them as _worse_ than any other PhD
| scientist talking with their credentials.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _Or Dawkins use his biology credentials to say something
| about philosophy /religion._
|
| It may be hard to imagine now, but at the time several major
| religious institutions had hard positions on subjects his
| biological knowledge was relevant to. His writings were
| instrumental in bringing about the retreat of those
| institutions from certain corporeal claims.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > podcast about fluoridation in tap water
|
| This has been a staple of crazies since, what, the 50s? I'm
| reminded of the speech from the deranged general in Dr
| Strangelove:
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/characters/nm0001330
|
| You could fit that right into a modern rightwing podcast
| without it being out of place.
| cvwright wrote:
| Or, you know, the citizens of hyper progressive Portland,
| Oregon, who voted down a measure to _finally_ fluoridate the
| city's tap water less than 10 years ago.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| It could be that part of the problem is that you only see their
| public persona. Start adding all the weasel words to imply that
| you think that something is 73% likely to be mostly true and
| you lose an audience
|
| Everyone (well, most everyone) could stand to examine their own
| problems (well, issues) with stating opinions as fact.
| temp8964 wrote:
| I don't see how this comment has anything to do with the
| article.
|
| They are scientists and they made errors outside of their
| field. Unless you can prove this is common to them. I don't see
| how this particular error they made is relevant to the
| discussion at all.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I believe the Latin name for your post is _ad hominem_ i.e.
| "Weinstein is a bad person."
|
| Maybe you could address what he actually said, instead of
| attacking him & Heather?
|
| I watched the video [1] I assume you're talking about. The word
| "reactive" is never spoken (I searched). While I _do_ buy
| iodized salt and I 'm not worried about it, their concerns
| about getting too MUCH iodine are measured and well-spoken. The
| concerns about fluoridation are, too (that the evidence for it
| is very thin, and the fluoride in water is not the same
| compound as was tested). Again, these are not wild-eyed
| conspiracists.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1oPcYDFPRU
| [deleted]
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Isn't iodine deficiency a common thing?
| roywiggins wrote:
| it was more of a thing before they started adding it to salt,
| yeah
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Yes. I have been a victim of this when in 5 August 2019 they
| snapped all internet and even telephone and almost 8 months long
| curfew /shutdown to prevent me from voicing my anger.
|
| The often used term was "misuse" in "misuse of social media"
| which meant they were watching every Facebook post and tweet and
| people were arrested for it.
| klyrs wrote:
| Is there a law? Or are the platforms in question voluntarily
| using guidelines as guidance? Are platforms punished in the
| courts for failing to follow guidelines or implement moderation?
| As far as I know, the answers to the above are a resounding "no,"
| and it follows that this isn't state censorship. It's the freedom
| of association, and freedom of speech, exercised by corporation-
| persons.
| II2II wrote:
| If I'm interpreting what the author said correctly, it is an
| incredibly resounding no. It sounds like these platforms are
| using the CDC as a credible source for information and the
| platforms are creating their own guidelines for what can and
| cannot be said.
|
| Being concerned about treating the government as a reliable
| source of information is one thing, but conflating it with
| guidance on acceptable speech is quite another.
| [deleted]
| chroem- wrote:
| Corporations _don 't_ have freedom of speech and it is
| misleading to suggest that they do. In fact, there is an
| enormous amount of legal precedent for mandated corporate
| speech. If you don't believe me, look at your nearest
| "nutrition facts" label.
| klyrs wrote:
| That precedent is, in fact, quite pertinent. Contrast with
| various platforms' labeling of misinformation, a law
| _mandating_ such labeling would be wholly consistent.
|
| But we don't even have that. First, the government would need
| to establish that the people are harmed by the lack of
| labeling.
| falcolas wrote:
| Corporation-persons. Is there a more dystopian concept in
| existence?
|
| Corporations are NOT PEOPLE. They're made up of people, but the
| entity itself is NOT A PERSON.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't repeat ideological boilerplate on HN and please
| don't use allcaps for empahsis - this is also in the site
| guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
| chroem- wrote:
| Is it boilerplate? It seems very relevant to the
| discussion, given that it's addressing a specific point in
| the parent comment.
| dang wrote:
| Boilerplate has to do with how often something gets
| repeated, so it's boilerplate independent of where it's
| inserted; which is kind of the problem with it.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Corporate personhood is older than America. Without legal
| personhood, how do corporations own anything? They've always
| been treated like legal persons, because that's sort of what
| corporations are _for_. They 're legal entities that can own
| stuff and do some things, like hiring people and buying and
| selling. That doesn't work without them in some sense being
| treated like persons in the eyes of the law.
|
| What they're not are _natural persons_.
|
| Exactly _how many_ legal rights corporations should have is a
| very good question, of course. But people get bent out of
| shape about corporate personhood as if it 's new or
| particularly Orwellian.
|
| (Governments have _always_ been legal persons- you can sue
| the government in court- if it lets you- and the government
| can sue you. The government owns property, pays salaries, and
| so on.)
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| While I agree with you, that's how the supreme court has
| interpreted the constitution.
|
| Let's take the strawman out of the picture and accept the
| fiction that corporations are not people. But, they are still
| _not the state_. They do not replace government services in
| any meaningful way -- choice of what to publish, and what not
| to publish, is firmly the role of private persons and
| commerce. Maintaining social media sites is _not_ the role of
| government. Ergo, this is not state censorship.
| leereeves wrote:
| The article suggests that government employees may be
| consulting with YouTube in these censorship decisions.
|
| And that consultation would seem to be prohibited by the first
| amendment, just as police aren't allowed to consult with PIs to
| violate people's rights, even if the PIs volunteer to do so.
|
| (In other words, it's the gov employees, not YouTube, who would
| be violating people's rights by doing this.)
| klyrs wrote:
| Is YouTube doing that voluntarily, or is that consultation
| required by law?
| salawat wrote:
| It doesn't really matter given the quid pro quo that could
| be facilitated through such engagement.
|
| There are more ways of implementing incentive structures
| and control mechanisms than you can possibly imagine, which
| is exactly why people are right to be concerned.
| akomtu wrote:
| It's the 3rd option: YT follows off-the-record
| recommendations to avoid potential problems with
| authorities. There are written, but unofficial, per-country
| rules and there's a well defined process to squash dissent:
| ML models analyze videos and comments to find non-complaint
| users, numerous contractors look at the automated flags and
| write their summaries, corp employees, up to VP level,
| review the reports and cancel the non-complaint users.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| Every social group eventually uses the weapon of censorship. It's
| not just government...even without a proper institutional
| structure , censorship will emerge as a thing that a social group
| does endogeneously.
|
| Like just scrolling back and looking at my last 10 posts on HN ,
| I had to delete them after a few minutes in order to cut my
| losses because they were being heavily downvoted and once you are
| in negative territory nobody can see your posts anymore.
|
| People just crave and love being surrounded by people who see
| things the same way as they do, so after a person has been burned
| a bunch of times, they'd start stepping outside themselves and
| acting on what they think will sell well socially among the
| community.
|
| Pretty soon everybody starts doing this and you'll soon have a
| community full of people who are worthy of an actor studio
| interview.
|
| Hollywood, DC, San Francisco and the Valley are prime examples of
| this
| akomtu wrote:
| It's because those who agree rarely bother to upvote, while
| those who disagree downvote often. It's the same in real world:
| disagreement in form of protests is loud and visible, while
| even massive support is quiet.
|
| One fix HN could make is to take into account the number of
| readers before hiding a comment: 4 downvotes is big when there
| are only 10 readers, but it's nothing when there's a million.
| FpUser wrote:
| In my opinion this voting system on public sites is bad idea.
| Simply showing number of upvotes / downvotes is sort of ok.
| Making downvoted posts loose visibility is the most fucked up
| implementation I think. It makes for heavy self censoring
| which in theory should be against the very idea of HN.
|
| Personally I sometimes upvote posts and had never downvoted a
| single one disregarding how much I do not like it.
|
| I know this one will be downvoted as well but I have better
| things to enjoy in life vs winning a pop contest on social
| media.
| maverick-iceman wrote:
| That's the best idea I read on how to solve this problem,
| which sadly means it won't be implemented.... :P
|
| For the record I did upvote you!
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Disapproval and shaming are very strong and potentially
| dangerous tools, but they are not the same as censorship, even
| though they overlap to some degree. (But what doesn't?)
|
| The worst kind of censorship is probably the emotionless,
| impersonal, mechanical sort done on a large scale either by
| specialized professionals or by robots.
| gerikson wrote:
| Betteridge's Law of Headlines points to "no".
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Another example of state censorship via private monopolies was
| AOC calling for the Apple and Google app stores to ban Parler
| following the Jan 6 capitol riot. If a sitting member of the
| government pressures private organizations to censor others, it
| should be considered a violation of the first amendment. Leaving
| aside the technicalities of law, it is unethical and immoral even
| otherwise and completely in conflict with American and
| classically liberal values.
|
| Glenn Greenwald wrote a great article about this titled "How
| Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed
| Parler" https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-
| sho...
| akomtu wrote:
| Guidelines here is an euphemism for orders. The pro-censorship
| faction in the gov isn't strong enough yet to openly censor
| media, but it's strong enough to coerce Twitter and the like with
| the passive-aggressive "guidelines".
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| The amount of gray posts in censorship threads always cracks me
| up.
|
| Please go on.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| This is my least favorite thing about HN, because it strongly
| reinforces groupthink. I'd much rather have the number of
| upvotes and downvotes visible, like Reddit, and leave the
| styling of the text unchanged.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Have the admins of HN ever defended their decision to grey
| out downvoted comments with some good arguments?
|
| Because reading a text thread where the color of the text
| constantly changes is rather annoying.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| If you happen to have NoScript installed, you can add
| something like this to the _My filters_
| ycombinator.com##.c00:style(color: #000 !important; )
| ycombinator.com##.c5a:style(color: #000 !important; )
| ycombinator.com##.c73:style(color: #000 !important; )
| ycombinator.com##.c82:style(color: #000 !important; )
| ycombinator.com##.c88:style(color: #000 !important; )
| ycombinator.com##.c9c:style(color: #000 !important; )
| ycombinator.com##.cae:style(color: #000 !important; )
| ycombinator.com##.cbe:style(color: #000 !important; )
| ycombinator.com##.cce:style(color: #000 !important; )
| ycombinator.com##.cdd:style(color: #000 !important; )
|
| Change the color to match your preference.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| It'd be cool to have an option in the user's HN
| profile/account that they can toggle if they want to hide
| the greying out
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Personally, I think that voting is ridiculous, but I see the
| point.
|
| It's one of the strongest methodologies for making a
| discussion board addictive.
|
| I think an interesting feature to add would be to have
| peoples' user areas show how many downvotes they have spewed
| forth.
| mnouquet wrote:
| Actually, it helps me figure out posts I should upvote.
| 99_00 wrote:
| People shake their heads and wonder how the Catholic church could
| have been so backwards, dogmatic, and ignorant as to jail
| Copernicus. Yet, here we are.
|
| "At the time, it was scarier to be associated with Trump and to
| become a tool for racists, so people didn't want to publicly call
| for an investigation into lab origins."
|
| https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
|
| Censoring commentary on scientific data because it doesn't fit
| with the a political narrative is anti-science.
|
| The rationale that well intentioned speech should be censored
| because may be used by people to spread misinformation in a way
| the speaker never intended is a horrible standard to uphold.
|
| When scientists openly and freely admit to self censorship for
| political reasons, it erodes the credibility of scientists.
| api wrote:
| Who is the modern Copernicus? Alex Jones? The church that
| advocates drinking bleach? Nazis? Neo-Stalinists?
|
| I used to be absolutely on the "free speech at any cost" side.
| I guess if you pinned me to the wall I sort of still would be,
| but my heart is just not in the fight.
|
| First they came for the Nazis, and I didn't do anything because
| I wasn't a Nazi.
|
| Then they came for the medical quacks telling people not to get
| vaccinated and to treat COVID by drinking bleach... during a
| global pandemic...
|
| Then they came for the people who thought the Earth was flat.
|
| Then they came for the misogynists and the advocates of sexual
| persecution.
|
| Then they came for the cult of personality that wanted a
| reality TV star and the My Pillow guy to stage a fascist coup.
|
| Oh no... who are they coming for next?!?
|
| If it were just a bunch of liars and fools yelling into the
| wind I wouldn't care. The really terrifying thing is how
| gullible people are. It seems like 1/3 of the population
| roughly will believe literally anything if it plays to their
| biases. Anything. There seems to be no bottom of the barrel.
|
| I picture a future with hordes of millions of gullible fools
| who can be commanded like armies by social media demagogues.
| This is exactly how the Rwandan genocide worked except it was
| talk radio commanding those machete wielding armies not
| Facebook. We used to poke fun at places like that for being
| superstitious and barbaric. After seeing things like flat Earth
| and Qanon I don't think anyone can ever point fingers again.
| uniqueid wrote:
| I picture a future with hordes of millions of gullible fools
| who can be commanded like armies by social media demagogues.
|
| I watched a stream of a London anti-lockdown protest the
| other day, and that's more or less what occurred to me.
|
| https://youtu.be/hy7bmdDGKZ8
|
| The stream is six hours long, but it's packed with moments
| such as:
|
| 35m -- Crowd listens to some conspiracy theorist blame all
| the world's ills on 'Kabalah'
|
| 1h 26m -- A face-spitting street altercation breaks out
| between an anti-masker and an alarmed doctor who apparently
| got caught in the demonstration.
|
| 2h 13m -- Some insane woman with a bullhorn explains that
| WiFi and 5g will 'destroy your ovaries' with 'Communism' (or
| something to that effect, anyways).
| api wrote:
| It's depressing as hell. My political DNA is libertarian
| but I am starting to wonder if there isn't a subset of
| humanity that simply can't handle this level of unfiltered
| access to information.
|
| Even worse I am having a tough time putting my finger on
| what the shortcoming of these people is.
|
| It's not IQ as I've seen and met quite a few gullible sheep
| of this sort who would undoubtedly score high. I don't see
| a strong correlation either way with intelligence.
|
| It doesn't even seem to be one's metaphysics or
| epistemology. I know devoutly religious people as well as
| mystics and occultist types who are nonetheless not
| gullible in the way that this crowd is gullible, and I have
| seen atheists and people with scientific backgrounds who
| are.
|
| Race, nationality, even educational attainment doesn't seem
| to map.
|
| All that is a bit anecdotal. Maybe there are patterns if
| you look at enough data. But from what I can see there is
| just this subset of humanity who easily falls for bullshit
| when it's framed in the right way.
|
| Anyone can be conned of course, but I mean people who seem
| to just fill up a syringe with this kind of kool aid and
| bang it into a vein.
|
| A friend of mine thinks it's a desperate desire to be
| special that's rooted in some kind of narcissism.
|
| Another less generous opinion I heard on a podcast is that
| these people know exactly what is being dog whistled in
| this stuff and they are closet genocidal racists hoping for
| their revolution.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Who is the modern Copernicus?"
|
| History being what it is, we may know around the year 2300.
|
| Let us hope the longevity science is onto something ...
| api wrote:
| I would put my money on the game theorists and complexity
| scientists, maybe even Stephen Wolfram. None of these have
| been deplatformed.
| spfzero wrote:
| We seem to be moving to the idea that people can not think for
| themselves and so need to be told what to do by "experts", who
| cannot be questioned. Your ability to think critically about
| what you see and hear, is being marginalized and ignored, in
| favor of gaining your obedience.
|
| Holding out examples of people who make bad decisions, is used
| to gain acceptance for the idea that no one can make good
| decisions, except these few ones, who you now have to obey.
| This is the new religion.
|
| Unfortunately, the experts and dogma of the day tend to turn
| out to be wrong, at huge harm.
|
| I'd rather accept that there is some small fraction of the
| population that can be easily mislead by manipulative
| misinformation, with all of the risk that entails. That's
| better than the coercive thought policing we're starting to
| see.
| comrh wrote:
| But their videos are still online, they just can't make ad money
| from them?
| ArcturianDeath wrote:
| Now that the facility of the digital tooling is more granular and
| refined, and theres no shortage of weak-minded grunts that are
| powertrippin to do what theyre told, by the telepath aliens in
| human disguise or transdimensionals with the ability to
| manipulate all digital processes or the government, as zealous
| intern lords over the online conversation or jannies of pre-crime
| trends, this is all now easier to implement when it will matter
| the most to our future: silencing anti-alien dissent after
| "arrival."
|
| The Roswell trojan horse and social infiltration to pressure the
| farce of 2020, is paying off. Abductees/contactees with negative
| experiences of the 40+ species will be flagged as "agents of
| "disinformation" and limited for "preemption of public
| criticism."
|
| https://reclaimthenet.org/world-economic-forum-makes-censors...
|
| https://fair.org/home/us-censorship-is-increasingly-official...
|
| https://archive.vn/WVDGU
|
| https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-case-of-intellectual-capture...
| ww2buff wrote:
| A corporation deciding not to run ads on videos of a crank
| promoting snake oil is not a First Amendment issue. It is barely
| even a censorship issue in the broadest sense of the term. Very
| sad to see Taibbi reduced to this kind of totally empty hysteria.
| mnouquet wrote:
| If promoting a certain snake oil because you'll receive
| government favours, then it _IS_ censorship, cf. all the Title
| IX unconstitutional enforcement following threats of pulling
| federal fundings.
|
| In this case, GAFAMs are scared as can be from being
| "regulated".
| soltero wrote:
| Related: Under India's new IT Rules, govt determines (of-course,
| arbitrarily) what is anti-national and intermediaries like
| Twitter and Facebook have to comply with deletion requests for
| such content.
|
| Govt is also asking WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging
| platforms to store information about the "originator" of message
| (which defies the concept of encryption).
| bostik wrote:
| I've said it before, but it deserves to be repeated again: the
| term "E2EE" has been hijacked to infer things that are
| decidedly _not_ within the remit of end-to-end encryption. We
| keep seeing the term to be interpreted to mean "fully
| anonymous communications".
|
| > _Govt is also asking [...] to store information about the
| "originator" of message (which defies the concept of
| encryption)._
|
| No, it doesn't. I realise this likely comes off as pedantic,
| but encryption has only ever implied _confidentiality_ , and
| more recently, _integrity_ of the communication content.
| Obscuring and /or hiding the information about the
| communicating parties is an entirely different - and in fact a
| lot harder - problem.[ss]
|
| Please note: I am not saying that governments requiring to
| store (rich) communications metadata is somehow right or
| proper. Hell no. As far as I see that's a massive invasion of
| privacy. But I will object to the misuse of terminology. It's
| bad enough that the shorthand form "crypto" has been hijacked
| by wasteful funny-money peddlers. I will fight tooth and nail
| to not let the term "encryption" suffer a similar fate.
|
| ss: At scale, that is. For example, using a numbers station
| will make it technically trivial (if expensive) to transmit a
| message from an unspecified sender to an unknown recipient. But
| enabling similar level of security AND anonymity to millions
| and millions of participants is a much, much, _much_ more
| difficult problem.
| wonnage wrote:
| It's not state censorship. There is no law driving these
| takedowns. It's the problem you get when one company has
| monopolized video.
|
| But serving videos for free isn't financially sustainable without
| advertising and network effects. So you're stuck with YouTube or
| some regional equivalent whether you like it or not.
| zugi wrote:
| It absolutely can be, and it's absolutely something to watch out
| for, but I'm not sure that it is government censorship in this
| case. YouTube is choosing who to ask ostensibly due to their
| expertise, not because of government threats or enforcement.
|
| That said, a few years ago one of things that kicked off the
| change from being relatively hands-off to more active content
| censorship by all of these platforms was being dragged before
| Congress and lectured and threatened that, if they didn't start
| voluntarily censoring content, the government would force them
| to. Those government threats, though they lacked immediate legal
| force, really do constitute government censorship. So there's an
| argument to be made that this whole new world of "voluntary"
| censorship by platform providers really is at its core government
| censorship.
| akomtu wrote:
| All those twitter-like companies have surprisingly uniform list
| of banned topics and list of topics that get promoted to the
| front page. If censorship wasn't a thing, there would be a
| variety of opinion, i.e. things you could say on Twitter but
| not on Facebook and vice versa.
| leereeves wrote:
| > YouTube is choosing who to ask ostensibly due to their
| expertise, not because of government threats or enforcement.
|
| It sounds like you've accepted the article's claim that YouTube
| is consulting government employees.
|
| If that's the case, aren't any gov employees who collaborate
| with YouTube here engaging in censorship?
|
| Imagine an analogous situation: a PI goes to the police and
| offers to break into a suspect's home and collect evidence, if
| the police will tell the PI what to look for. Accepting that
| offer and advising the PI on what to collect would be a
| violation of the suspect's rights, even if the police are
| merely consulting on the PIs voluntary actions.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| That comes down to nearly-unprovable hairsplitting. If
| government employees are demanding action, backed by force of
| law, then Yes. But if YT is merely free to follow or reject
| advice as it chooses, then No.
|
| I can hear advice all day long from experts, but whether I
| choose to follow or ignore, the consequence is on me.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| That's not really a fair representation of reality. YT and
| others aren't really "free to follow". There are
| implications for their choice. For example they may face
| less anti trust scrutiny from the progressive left if they
| continue to perform censorship that aligns to that
| political ideology. They may face less scrutiny when it
| comes to taxes or privacy laws as well. It is precisely
| because we can't prove or disprove these links that there
| should be no situation where state employees ask for
| censorship (either hard bans or actions like algorithmic
| changes), period.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| > we can't prove or disprove these links
|
| Then the burden of proof lies with the person making the
| claim that these links exist. Until then, they
| functionally don't exist from an outside perspective.
| Covzire wrote:
| Facebook's censoring of #Revolution via their claims of moral
| superiority should frighten the shit out of every free person on
| earth. While we still have it reasonably good in America, their
| willingness to suppress speech in good times doesn't bode well
| for people who will be oppressed during bad times.
|
| The first amendment made it clear that not even the government
| had the authority to use their vast moral authority, as they
| exercise through the legal system, to prevent people from
| speaking and organizing.
|
| But #BigTech has a nuclear option on the speech on the web's most
| visible ecosystem, social media, through purely market forces and
| are doing the bidding of a single political party, exclusively.
| It's not just horrifying that they amassed so much unchecked
| power, but since 2016 they're actively using and abusing it to
| suppress legitimate political speech in every nook and cranny
| they control.
| kyrra wrote:
| A possibile solution is changes to section 230. I saw a good
| approach last year that you can read about here:
| https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/washington-can-put-a-...
|
| The key bit was a recommendation from the Trump DOJ, which
| said:
|
| > The Justice Department, which last month announced
| recommended amendments to the statute, has suggested that
| Congress replace "otherwise objectionable" with "unlawful" and
| "promotes terrorism."
|
| Which is in detail here:
| https://www.justice.gov/archives/ag/department-justice-s-rev...
| klyrs wrote:
| If #revolution getting censored by facebook is enough to stop
| the movement, then it was slacktivism to begin with. Or as Gil
| Scott Heron said, the revolution will not be televised. One
| cannot expect mainstream businesses to support a movement that
| will fundamentally destabilize their revenue streams.
|
| Libertarians are at a loggerhead here. On one hand, businesses
| are meant to be free to make money however they please, and the
| market is supposed to correct whatever human rights abuses
| occur. But the market doesn't seem interested in actual zero-
| censorship publishing platforms, so on the other hand, free
| speech advocates are concerned with perceived overreach by the
| largest platforms.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Media owners have always used their ownership to push their own
| version of reality. I guess the difference now is that we have
| allowed so much concentration of media ownership in so few
| hands. Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell.
|
| Or is this just the current story? Maybe media has always been
| as concentrated as it is now, we just didn't notice.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| > Antitrust is pretty much dead from what I can tell
|
| It has just been defined to mean 'thing that harms consumer
| prices'.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The question is: who is the consumer? The idea that
| Facebook users == consumers might not be right. Perhaps the
| real consumers are the corporations that pay for ads. In
| that case, some price fixing might be out there. I doubt
| that Facebook does its best to keep the ad price on the
| level of a perfectly competitive market.
| ndndksksl wrote:
| Public social media is really fundamentally different from
| traditional media because it functions as the public square
| in a way that traditional media never did.
|
| As such, it needs to be evaluated and regulated as the novel
| thing that it is. It's not a newspaper and it's not a
| telephone company, and it's time to stop trying to apply old
| regulatory arguments and mindsets to the new situation.
|
| So far, attempts to regulate social media show barely an
| understanding of the problem at hand, but I hope we can
| recognize that there needs to be defined a novel regulatory
| framework to prevent tragedy of the commons or heavy handed
| ideological censorship on public social media networks
|
| In the meantime, the value of privately owned and operated,
| and invite-only social networks (like setting up your own
| Mattermost or IRC servers) will continue to go up in relation
| to public networks, because only in tight knit private
| communities can anyone actually speak their mind.
| mikeiz404 wrote:
| I'm curious as to why this was downvoted.
|
| Is it because they disagreed with some of the opinions? I
| was under the impression that's not what down voting was
| for here.
|
| Personally I think it is worth considering a social media
| platform, once it reaches a certain scale and depending on
| how content is distributed, as a "public square" or at
| least more towards a "public square" on the continuum
| between a private community and a large scale public one.
|
| Your Undivided Attention has an episode which touches on
| this: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/27-wont-you-be-my-
| neighbo.... The rest of their series has some interesting
| perspectives as well.
| mikeiz404 wrote:
| Could some one who down voted this elaborate on their
| reasoning?
|
| I can no longer edit the above post but it looks like the
| parent post I was referring to is no longer down voted.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Compaining about downvotes or the reasons behind
| downvotes is a reliable way to attract downvotes. The is
| expressly mentioned in the site guidlines:
|
| > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It
| never does any good, and it makes boring reading. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| mikeiz404 wrote:
| Understood, thanks
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Social media also has tremendous potebtial for
| manipulation. If Fox News or New York Times prints false
| allegations, they and their brand are on the hook.
|
| But Facebook can just boost someome who holds that opinion,
| you would have the inpression that millions of independant
| people are thinking that, and would never know who is
| pulling the strings.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| One of the problem of such networks is permanency of
| something that we still treat as spoken word. If posts were
| ephemeral, they would present much less of an attack
| surface for various digital mobs.
|
| Maybe there should be an option for users to limit their
| comment lifetime to N minutes. With N starting somewhere
| around 5. Of course, you can do this manually, but a
| semiautomatic mechanism would work better.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Self-destructing messages only really work if you trust
| every person who reads them AND their devices. They can
| somewhat limit exposure (especially in obscurity) but
| also introduce the risk of establishing unwarranted
| perceptions of security.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| People were always able to reproduce things you said--by
| repeating the words.
|
| They can even claim you said something you _didn 't_ say!
| agency wrote:
| That is true but I think it can be misleading to apply
| this kind of logic when technology has fundamentally
| changed the economics of this kind of recording. For
| example, it's always been perfectly legal to station a
| police officer next to the road and have them write down
| the license plate numbers of cars on public roads. Does
| this mean we should allow law enforcement the unregulated
| ability to deploy automated license plate reader systems
| everywhere to track all of our movements in real time?
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