It's 100% inline with free speech to let a given website decide what they want to publish. Even if it is a very popular website.
If they make bad decisions, then people can go to competitors; it's as easy as typing in a different URL. That's how the Internet--and open societies in general--are supposed to work.
What it looks like to me--someone who has been on the Internet since before the turn of the century--is that a more recent generation of people grew up with these very popular websites as part of their lives, and they came to believe that these very popular websites are somehow inherent to the Internet and to society in general.
They're not. The Internet is more available to entrepreneurs, startups, and new ideas today than it was when Twitter and Facebook were started. They're not too big to fail.
Where does one go when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube seem to take these steps in tandem? The joke of "go make your own social network" has been tried with places like Parler and Gab, but they get banned from app stores, ironically blocked from technically, but not ideologically, decentralized services like Mastodon, or even dropped from web hosts. The open Internet is dead.
> Where does one go when Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube seem to take these steps in tandem?
I know folks like to get all conspiratorial over social networks "acting in tandem", but it really shouldn't be all that surprising.
Individuals have vastly different tolerances for all sorts of things, but if you lump them into groups of tens of thousands, the average tolerance for things will be quite similar.
When the latest alt-right provocateur hits the threshold of bad PR for Facebook, he's likely right at the threshold for the other major social networks. No need for a shadowy cabal.
The question is who defines that threshold. In this case, its a few people at a few tech companies, and I don’t feel like it’s controversial to say that they all internally inherit the progressive/leftist/whatever Bay Area culture they’re largely based in.
You can still publish! AWS and cloudflare will happily take your money if you're not a neonazi. If you are a neonazi, A) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTs_Q4hEqmA B) you can find some mom-and-pop co-lo that will take your money. AFAIK, 8chan is still serving page views.
>cloudflare will happily take your money if you're not a neonazi
Cloudflare isn't as ideologically pure as you might think. To this date, they have only refused service to Daily Stormer and 8chan for political reasons. Real neonazi sites like stormfront dot org (unlike 8chan that had many apolitical communities like for games or anime) continue to enjoy their protection because it hasn't negatively affected their stock (the news on DS and 8ch broke before the IPO, but their launch might have been a failure due to bad press).
Sure, but that's like "if the utility companies are cutting of your water and electricity, just make your own! nobody is stopping you from hooking an exercise bike to a dynamo and buy bottled water at the store". Technically true, practically not really a thing.
You can say just about anything you want, but that doesn't mean other folks are required to listen to you or expend their resources to amplify your speech.
And that's a good thing. Because if you can force others to publish/host/amplify your speech, others can force you to do the same with theirs.
Sorry I just fail to understand the conservatives' values here. They will go to the supreme court to fight for their right not to sell cupcakes to gay people but then turn around and demand to control what twitter does with their servers.
This is false. Nobody has fought for a right not to sell cupcakes to gay people.
In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the owner declined to perform a creative service, that being decorating a cake for a gay wedding.
You might think that is also wrong, and that’s fine, but it’s a very important distinction. Legally compelling someone to perform a service that violates their religious beliefs is tricky to balance against non-discrimination. You have to consider the precedent that doing so would set. The supreme court recognized this in a 7-2 decision, so it’s clearly not a trivial or ridiculous objection. It only is to you because you don’t share the religious belief. But we must balance everyone’s rights, and that isn’t always easy.
The baker refused to make a custom made cake for the wedding and offered them an off the shelf cake instead. That is very different from a big corporation refusing to serve you off the shelf services that requires no manual actions at all on their part.
Some of twitter's users see them as complicit in spreading disinformation. So it does cost them something of value to do nothing. It costs them their reputation with some segment of users. Twitter is making a judgement call. They think pissing off some conservatives by banning this link will net them more good will from other users.
On the morals of it; I think that if twitter thinks that banning all conservatives will make them more revenue they can and should be allowed to do it. My value statement would hold equally if you :s/conservatives/liberals/g.
Conservative lawmakers have become very found of the Obama quote, "Elections have consequences." Well, the culture war has consequences too. And conservatives have completely gotten their asses kicked in the culture war in the last 30 years. Due to anachronisms in our means of determining representation this has not translated into a loss of legislative power. But if they want to hold sway outside of Washington they will have to make an effort to win back the hearts and minds of the public and more importantly the American consumer.
They will go to the supreme court to fight for [a sole proprietor's] right not to sell cupcakes to gay people but then turn around and demand to control what [giant corporation] does with their servers.
So if @Jack solely owned twitter it would be ok? I don't see how being on the NYSE makes the morals any different. If anything having a board of directors and shareholders makes TWTR more democratic not less.
What does limited liability have to do with a corporation being owned by one person? I assume this poster is questioning the "giant corporation" part. Maybe you meant to say "any corporation"?
I also mistakenly thought the cake baker was a sole proprietor. They are incorporated. I should have done a simple search before posting my original comment.
That said, I now mostly agree with the comment I was originally replying to.
> What does limited liability have to do with a corporation being owned by one person?
Correct, nothing. To clarify:
My position is that an entity enjoying limited liability (which in the US includes an LLC or corporation owned by a single person) has exchanged "rights" for indemnity and therefore can be compelled to - for example - bake a cake or not censor content hosted on their servers, but that a sole proprietor can do whatever they want re: refusing service or moderating content.
I think the whole idea about not selling cupcakes to gay people is stupid (but I understand the theory, it's like asking an ideological vegan to provide the side dishes to a BBQ), but it's not the same issue.
In monopoly situations (or duopoly, if you wish), there are generally different rules that apply, because you can't just go somewhere else to do business: there is nothing else. Hence utility companies can't simply go "I don't like your nose, no water for you".
I guess I just don't see twitter as a monopoly. I lived a long time before they existed and I hope/suspect I will live a long time after they are a major player in the news cycle. (Lets just say I'm not long twitter.)
I think creating new platforms has actually gotten easier since twitter's inception. Back in the day it was almost magical to have a website that performed at scale. Now you just hand a credit card to your favored cloud provider.
In your metaphor I see the internet as the utility not the platform provider. If akamai or level 3 decide that they wouldn't carry your traffic, then you might have a case that you're being censored.
If Apple can keep Epic out of the app store then @Jack can ban whomever he damn well feels like.
The audience is the monopoly. The entire media and political class are addicted to Twitter, and they haven't even heard of Mastodon or ActivityPub or whatever.
Sounds like twitter is doing a good job of keeping it's user base happy :) and I would argue that not spreading disinformation is part of keeping them happy.
Other companies/platforms are free to advertise or offer services to entice users to switch. As conservatives like to remind us money is speech. You are not entitled to someone else's attention but you can try to buy it.
Maybe there's a higher principle here than partisan warfare?
If they were banning Russiagate conspiracies, while letting conservative stuff run rampant, would you be giving me the pitch about how private property is more important than free expression?
Maybe there's a higher principle here than partisan warfare?
You're going to call me a neoliberal shill ;) but I'd say my higher principle is the market. There is a reason why Nestle, Version, and Disney spend loads of money on twitter and not on gab. Nestle doesn't want chocolate chip ads next to holocaust denial. So yes if twitter decided that pissing off their liberal users grossed more revenue I'm fine with it.
Don't impute principles to the market. Those companies wouldn't touch gay rights with a 10 foot pole until one day all of a sudden they're beating their way to the front of the line at the pride parade. They'll follow what's popular, and if that's liquidating jews, they'll do it (some of them did!).
In this particular case, where there's a common carrier for information, we figured out the market failures and how to handle them long ago, the answer is neutrality to the message. There are some people in the thread making the case that it's different now, and maybe it is, maybe we need a different approach, but "just trust the market" is the dumbest idea ever.
The market is paper-clip-optimizing gray goo. Harness it, but don't anthropomorphize it and certainly don't "trust" it.
As far as comment wars go this a been very civil. Thanks! :) This will be my last reply in this thread but I wanted to try to make the case against conservative populism one more time.
Don't impute principles to the market.
I'm not saying the market has principles. People can be moral or immoral. As you have noted, the market is amoral. I was saying that the debate over who can say what and where they can say it can be solved by the market. Twitter owns their severs and can decide what they want to do with them. You don't have the right to compel them to allow you to use their severs. You are free to build (or rent) your own servers and scream into the void. No one is obligate to listen to you but you are free to provide them something of value in return for their attention.
Those companies wouldn't touch gay rights with a 10 foot pole until one day all of a sudden they're beating their way to the front of the line at the pride parade.
This is very true and it should be of great concern to conservatives. In the previous generations, conservatives had a lock on the culture war but since the 90s they have completely ceded the field to progressives and liberals.
Republicans have only won the popular vote for president once since 1990. Trump isn't even attempting to win the popular vote this year. The median income in 2018 was 10k higher in blue states than red states. And you wonder why advertisers (and thus twitter) value blue tribe users more?
Conservatives can't gerrymander the market. They are going to need to find a way to compete for relevance with the majority of the public not just their base.
They'll follow what's popular, and if that's liquidating jews, they'll do it (some of them did!).
This is a straw-man. No one is in favor of letting billionaires commit extrajudicial killings. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is higher in my principle stack than the rights of market forces.
In conclusion, I will say there is a way out of this morass for conservatives. They have to kick the neo-nazis, the proud boys, and qanon out of the party. They have to accept science and that the scientific method is the best way to determine objective reality. If they continue to call anything that falls outside of their accepted narratives "fake news", they will continue to lose the culture war. And thus, be more and more sidelined from the national discourse. Due the undemocratic elements of our constitution they conservatives may retain political power, but in the end, the consent of the governed is more important.
Ah, I had it right the first time, you're stuck in partisan war rather than a property rights absolutist.
Don't trade principles for that, it's not worth it, the news cycle will be different tomorrow anyways. Certainly don't trust the corporations over individuals or the press for a one news-cycle 'win'. What kind of liberal values are those? "George W Bush liberals"?
Those projects failed because the general public agrees with FB/TW/YT’s actions so far. When they bad QAnon, the only people annoyed enough to leave are QAnon adherents, so you get a new social network full of trash. As a result, nobody else follows them.
People don't visit FB/TW/YT for their editorial control. People tolerate FB/TW/YT's actions because it is easier, they don't necessarily agree with them.
Scale makes a difference. These social networks are no longer just a small private website serving a local community but a critical communications medium.
When they can influence billions and shape elections, it's time to seriously review their power. This is how we treat ISPs and phone providers today, and social networks of a certain size should be considered in the same class.
Undersea cables, phone lines, and the radio spectrum are critical communications media. Private web sites with selective publication criteria by way of their content moderation policies are not.
Until you are delisted from google, banned by youtube, blocked by facebook and twitter and now your online potential was reduced in 90%. Imagine being blocked from every walmart,costco, 7-eleven and being told that it is freedom because you still have the choice to go elsewhere
> Imagine being blocked from every walmart,costco, 7-eleven and being told that it is freedom because you still have the choice to go elsewhere
I'm imagining someone who messes up badly enough to get banned from all those places and still somehow blames the stores rather than their own actions.
> I'm imagining someone who messes up badly enough to get banned from all those places and still somehow blames the stores rather than their own actions.
That’s exactly what antisemites say of Jewish expulsions.
Should private companies have any regulation at all? Should oil companies avoid pollution? Should ISPs ensure quality of service? Should medical companies ensure safety? Why is it that trillion-dollar companies that are larger and more powerful than anything else before should not be regulated when it comes to something as crucial as our freedom to communicate?
I find it ironic that another major HN story today is another instance of Google wiping out someone's account without any recourse, erasing their online presence and decades of data. Is that the new normal? Megacorporations ruling our lives without reason or appeal?
The world has changed. Social media is no longer just a website. It's communication fabric with network effects larger than entire nations that surrounds our lives. We either deal with it accordingly or risk losing much more.
I fundamentally disagree with your premise that these incumbent commercial social media services are a communications fabric. These companies are in no way common carrier, critical communications media.
The underlying physical infrastructure, sure, the underlying standards like the TCP/IP stack, DNS, Ethernet, etc, well those are too, but these are categorically not quite same as what you are arguing should also be included in that group.
But why? You offer no explanation other than saying you disagree. What exactly is the difference?
More people communicate over social media than phone lines today. Why is the former not equivalent to the later? Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey said that he believes social media is a human right - do you disagree with him?
You keep talking about social media in general but the question is whether Twitter and Facebook specifically--just those two companies--are critical infrastructure.
Obviously Twitter is not because it has been down for about an hour now and life is going on just fine.
I'm not sure that "critical infrastructure" as regards to communications mediums and legislation should be understood in the terms of absolute necessity, rather by terms of popularity and wide usage. That wide usage brings with it a lot of power on the part of the platform owners and a certain immunity to being boycotted or replaced.
The critical question is if they ought to be allowed to wield that power unchecked, up to and including when that reach has progressed far enough to have real impacts on our political system, and so impacts on people's lives.
Remember, we're talking about what we'd like the law to be, not what the law is. These definitions are up for debate and redefinition.
Of course they ought to be allowed to affect the political system. The whole point of the First Amendment is to ensure that private citizens can act to change the government—the fundamental concept behind the design of the U.S. federal government.
News organizations have wielded this power for at least a century. Their decisions on what stories to publish obviously have political implications, and in some cases their editorial boards even explicitly endorse one candidate.
Facebook and Twitter are private entities, just like The NY Times or Fox News.
Section 230 applies equally to any interactive computer service, whether it is operated by Twitter, Facebook, NY Times, Fox, Ycombinator, or even you or me.
The First Amendment applies to everyone in the U.S.
Yes, and since social networks are only third-party content, they should not be interfering with it otherwise they are exercising editorial control and are now first-party content.
I said communications medium, not infrastructure. Life goes on fine when the internet is down or your phone is disabled, but they're still considered important and necessary.
Facebook and Twitter are just 2 of the biggest with many others like TikTok, Whatsapp, WeChat. It's the size and scope that should be used as a measure of when they cross over into public utility vs private project.
It is about political power, Facebook and Twitter shouldn't have the power to significantly alter elections by selectively choosing what information people see.
Facebook and Twitter make money through the sale of advertisements and the sale of data for market research purposes. If their power needs to be moderated, people can do like the old television days and boycott their advertisers:
The "old television days" are long over. Considering the size of these companies and their advertisers, there is no way that boycotting or other protest would make any impact.
Basically everyone advertises there. So boycotting their advertisers is like boycotting earning money because your disagree with the government and want to hurt their tax revenue.
> Should private companies have any regulation at all?
I can actually get behind no regulation for private companies, twitter can censor who they like as I can drive my favorite tank registered as my company vehicle and don't bother with taxes anymore.
When they can influence billions and shape elections, it's time to seriously review their power.
Yeah, but it seems like FB and Twitter have been reviewing their power over the last four years.
They looked at the power of trolling-network, botnets etc to the influence elections. They basically triggered a circuit-breaker when a heavy hit-piece hit their networks.
Which is to say "the power of social networks" isn't just the power of the owners of the networks but also the power of groups embedded in the networks. Should these providers be fair brockers for all kind of manipulated viral content as well as for individual positions? Should they use their position of the ultimate kill switch to be the ultimate authority? I don't know but I don't think you put the most recent events as Facebook versus Organic Content - it's more Facebook versus Rupert Murdoch.
They have no accountability or oversight. Their reviews are completely up to them and they have nothing to prove to anyone about efficacy beyond increasing advertising revenue as much as possible for investors.
> .... and they came to believe that these very popular websites are somehow inherent to the Internet and to society in general. They're not.
Amen. And my feeling is that we would be better off without them. This is why i'm in favor of slow computing, slower network speeds, and slower lifestyles. (I should state that this is not sarcasm)
Modern 4k monitors are awesome. Need a fast computer to drive them.
My phone shoots 20 megapixels photos. I only post them on social media once in a year or so, but have cloud backups and I need bandwidth for that. I watch movies sometimes, Blu-ray ain’t available at local physical retail, again need internet bandwidth and local storage.
If you're an entrepreneur today and you start an internet company without paying Google or Facebook money for advertising you're probably not going to succeed. The only question is how much marketing "tax" these companies will extract from you. If you have direct competitors, you'll at least have to pay Google to keep their name off of the first search results for your company.
> It's 100% inline with free speech to let a given website decide what they want to publish.
Imagine I make a website where I censor everything except pro Trump memes. Is that a bastion of free speech, compared to a website where I allow, y'know, actual free speech and discourse?
I can't stand when people try to conflate the first amendment with freedom of speech. Nobody is (seriously) arguing that websites shouldn't have the legal freedom under our government to limit speech to whatever they desire. What we're arguing is that these platforms ought to value free speech as a principle and act impartially. Of course they have, and should have, the freedom to censor whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. But they should have the integrity not to.
Facebook and Twitter have never been impartial principled venues for free speech. They have blocked content from the very beginning, mostly relating to sex and violence. Facebook even banned photos of mothers breastfeeding their children.
And they make editorial decisions constantly about what content each person sees. The fact that these decisions are scaled by computer algorithms does not mean they are not happening.
This idea that they are neutral and free communications channels is a marketing message that they invented and pushed, because they thought it would help them succeed in business. We don’t have to believe them.
They’re just private companies, two among millions. If they make unpopular decisions about how to operate, they will fail. They should be allowed to do that.
Conversely, if they make popular decisions that you disagree with, it doesn’t mean the whole concept of free speech is damaged. Again: just two companies.
>What we're arguing is that these platforms ought to value free speech as a principle and act impartially. [...] But they should have the integrity not to.
But you're ignoring the fact that the corporations' value system consists of maximizing profit.
Anything that isn't pushing in that direction is both a distraction and a hindrance to the stated goals of the corporation -- making money.
Valuing free speech or having integrity are laudable ideals. I do my best to prioritize both. Sometimes I fail. But I do the best I can.
But my (or your) goals as an individual aren't relevant in this context.
Changing the incentives for these corporations to do whatever it takes to maximize profit would be a good thing.
That will entail the willingness of a majority of us to vote with our feet/wallet, likely aided with smart regulation.
But until we change those incentives/priorities, the status quo is what we'll get.
If they make bad decisions, then people can go to competitors; it's as easy as typing in a different URL. That's how the Internet--and open societies in general--are supposed to work.
What it looks like to me--someone who has been on the Internet since before the turn of the century--is that a more recent generation of people grew up with these very popular websites as part of their lives, and they came to believe that these very popular websites are somehow inherent to the Internet and to society in general.
They're not. The Internet is more available to entrepreneurs, startups, and new ideas today than it was when Twitter and Facebook were started. They're not too big to fail.