"If Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down. Give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it." It's like the phone company. If I call you up and I say something horrible to you on the phone, the phone company doesn't get in trouble. But the moment they started taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed, they basically lost their right to be viewed as a carrier. And now all of a sudden they've taken on a liability. They're sliding down this slippery slope into ruin, where the left wants them to take down the right, the right wants them to take down the left, and now they have no more friends, they have no allies. Traditionally the libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats would have stood up in principle for the common carriers, but now they won't. So my guess is, as soon as Congress (this day is coming if not already here...)... the day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president, the next congressman. They're literally picking, and they have the power to pick, so they will be controlled by the government."

Once you start basing your business model on selectively making some content more visible, you have already crossed a rubicon between a strictly neutral common carrier and a publisher.

(There is an error in the quote where they use publisher when they mean common carrier, a publisher is precisely an organisation that does have full editorial control of what they put out which is the opposite of what they intend from the rest of the quote.

In addition, notice that even GMail doesn't actually filter spam. It just hides it - it's an assistant, not arbiter of what you should see. It's more than happy for you to adjust the filters (for yourself personally).

Edit: GMail also does prioritization as of recently - but again, the purpose of that is to help users not filter content. Again, those algorithms are also adjustable for each user separately, they just have some "smart" defaults.

This is not accurate. There is a long on-going issue with GMail (and others) wholesale blocking delivery of email from domains/IPs/providers it deems to be spam or otherwise inappropriate. GMail users get no indication/notification, and generally have no idea that email sent to them was simply not delivered.

- Reject delivery of mail from sources it has determined to be spammy (e.g. residential IPs) - this mechanism allows the sender to be aware that delivery failed.

- Accept delivery and then silently drop the message somewhere between after accepting delivery but before appearing in the end user's mailbox.

In either case, there is nothing you (the mailbox holder) can do. In the second case, there is no way for anyone to know the message hasn't been delivered.

Conservative outlets work similarly, but they seem to have bigger online operations and are hard to get out of. My in laws get barraged with this stuff, and a mail provider like GMail or Microsoft gets a lot of spam signals from it I’m sure.

If you explicitly solicit those emails, eg by signing up to a newsletter, it's not spam.

On the other hand I get unsolicited email from some Democrat groups, and I never see such emails in spam.

If those emails are flagged because they’re “conservative” then I agree with you that needs to he corrected.

However, if those emails are flagged because they violate well known spam rules then let’s help “conservative” email senders to follow the rules. Examples include not using single or double opt-in for signup, not honoring or providing an opt-out link, using emails from a bulk list that includes known flagged emails, not including a plain text copy of the email in the message, and originating from a flagged server. Reputable email services like MailChimp go to great lengths to educate email list admins how to follow these rules & curate high value email lists.

One year, I made a concerted effort to troll some friends by getting them bumper stickers from the opposing party that they supported (e.g. dems got republican bumper stickers, repubs got democrat bumper stickers).

Since then, despite being sure to opt out of mails at the time of purchase, and clicking 'unsubscribe' numerous times, both parties continue to spam me.

Gmail filters these emails into spam for me. Thank goodness.

I'm led to believe that if enough gmail users mark emails as spam, this will get fed across to other users that haven't. So you can probably blame people like me for marking these messages as spam, for it occurring to you.

Or y'know, they could actually honor the 'unsubscribe' request and stop spamming me, and I wouldn't have to mark it (legitimately) as spam.

You can freely view the emails in your spam folder, with one click. You can optionally move the emails to your inbox and train Gmail ("not spam" button) not to place them there in the future.

It's going too far to call it censorship (in any manner) when an email provider places an email into a spam folder that requires one click to view/review.

Times and leadership has changed since though.

I don't understand this argument at all. Is it so difficult for users to curate the list of accounts they follow?

For better or worse the types Of things which get called to be banned from a platform for being unacceptable speech rarely resemble the specific styles of advertising we classify as spam.

Another argument is let users be ther own spam control.have some idiot acquaintance from middle school who keeps spamming pyramid scheme and/or nazism? Fine, just unfriend them.

As long as you are given control over what content is pushed at you directly, there is no need to sensor the whole platform because of a specific undesirable.

I think Google lets you report numbers as spam? (And, of course, caller id can be faked, but the important bit is that spam will differ statistically from legitimate calls.)

Both individual and administrative filters are necessary.

Just because politics isn't trying to sell you a penis extension doesn't mean it isn't trying to sell you something far worse.

It doesn't even matter how political content is published. What matters is that currently voters get more protection from a faulty toaster than from lies knowingly generated by politicians and corporate PR outfits.

The creation of deliberately false "talking points", fake news, smear campaigns, organised trolling and astroturfing, fake reviews, fake feedback, and other kinds of cognitive pollution should be banned from all forms of media.

Which is not to say this is easy or straightforward. But attempts should be made - because lying to voters and consumers is absolutely toxic to genuine democracy.

Btw, laying in politics has happened for like forever. Is there any evidence that it’s worse than in the past?

Spam is unwanted email that you did not sign up to receive and sent from someone who you do not know.

And years before Facebook was even created, a middle way was also proposed where a carrier like Facebook wouldn't be legally responsible for the content they carried, unless they started to select and/or moderate that content, at which point they would lose the carrier status, becoming a simple broadcaster, which would be legally responsible for everything that they would help to broadcast.

But since the homepage feed (or any medium really) displays contents in a certain order, some selection must take place.

Typically some algorithm (usually a recommender system together with some business logic) is used to determine which contents from all that's available to you are actually shown to you and in what order.

Bias seems to be an unavoidable part of the design to me.

Abstract ideas of unavoidable bias are only of academic interest; the right wing of politics is justified in seeing Google as a direct political threat. That would not be justified if Google had a strict "no political talk, no political campaigning, we are the Switzerland of the internet" style policy for their workplace.

>the outcome of a democratic election conflicts with Google's values.

What's wrong with this? The outcomes of the previous Presidential elections conflicted with many other companies' values. Every political election's outcome conflicts with some company's values, because companies stand to gain or lose depending on the policies enacted by that politician.

I'm curious that you would assume that as being the default position ?

Google could have avoided this situation by not explicitly championing political views inside their organisation.

Also the energy situations you cite aren't really comparable, the companies are only lobbying for things that make them more money and they don't have the same sort of power as Google in the political sphere.

>the companies are only lobbying for things that make them more money

Every company does this if they can, and it's either going to help or hurt some political side. The case you're making here is that Google is bad for Republicans. Maybe, but coal companies are bad for Democrats (they give money to Republicans to help them win races), so why is this OK for coal companies, but not Google? I don't see the difference. As long as other companies or industries are allowed to influence politics with money, it's perfectly OK for Google to influence elections however they want, and it would be wrong to break them up because, as I said before, the Republican party is opposed to anti-trust law.

Circumstances were different - Microsoft wasn't doing anything particularly political. They aren't pro-Republican. This is the difference between politically attacking an entity because it is a corporation (a bad reason) vs attacking because they are politically active (an acceptable reason).

That is the central point. Google are removing potential defences against a political attack.

> Maybe, but coal companies are bad for Democrats (they give money to Republicans to help them win races), so why is this OK for coal companies, but not Google?

It is OK for Google, they can donate to whoever they want to. The issue is if they are going to be an partisan actor they control too much information and have too much influence on how people gather information.

If they can donate to whomever they want, they are also morally correct to control information however they want. Giving money to politicians is bribery, and is much more direct than merely controlling information on the internet. Personally, as long as bribery is legal, I have no problems with Google using a different tactic. It's much more ethical to try to shape peoples' opinions at large than to directly bribe politicians.

Compared to news media where the actors are highly partisan but there are strong voices and opportunities to be heard for all points of view. The alternatives are a lot thinner for Web search and Youtube; and most people would be shocked if it did turn out they were actively pushing a message.

Besides, I'd expect political donation laws to come under attack to. It is a very political question. Google should have stuck to strategies and pronouncements that are neutral so that they were less likely to get involved in partisan politics.

It doesn't really matter whether you see it as ethical or not; what matters is that Google has huge and largely unchallenged reach in a field and appear to be official stances by management on social issues that they do not need to. This makes them a legitimate political target.

As long as the experimental process is rigorous and the people are incentivised to use the right metric (and the metric isn't politically biased), then it should be fine.

However, upon making that argument I find myself concerned at the possibility that Google's corporate interests (and perhaps some political interests) may shape which questions get asked, and thus the direction the service takes.

It's quite analagous to Chomsky's views of news organisations in Manufacturing Consent.

I know I'm setting up a bit of a straw man here but my point is even chronological order can be exploited.

Especially as this thread has already mostly said spam filtering (which your example would easily trigger) isn’t in opposition towards a goal of neutral status.

The question is, how easy can it be?

The straw man, is indeed, that you can filter such, client- or server-side. If you see the same shit the whole time, you ignore it all. Easy; even IRC clients with scripting had such features in the 90s. Here is a list of techniques used in e-mail filtering [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_filtering#See_also

Let's say for example you have a community contributed labeling system that allows users to label content. A recommendation algorithm might then be written that simply pulls the top 10 highest number of viewed pieces content that have the same labels as a piece of content the viewer just viewed. In this case, there is nothing in the algorithm that evaluates the content itself. The evaluation was done by users of the software, not the software itself.

There may be some editorial bias introduced if the userbase of a given social media site is themselves skewed in a particular direction. For instance, there seems to be some skew in the content that shows up on my Tumblr dashboard that seems fairly irrespective of anything I've subscribed to. But even that isn't necessarily damning for Tumblr, because they're not necessarily making an editorial decision to promote that content.

- Users get to create their own profile. For instance in your profile you get to selected whether you would like to see content geared towards men/women/any. And this would follow for a whole slew of other topics, similar to the opaque profile companies are creating on users today without their consent or input.

- All recommended videos have all their profile tags openly shown. And the reason for recommendation is also completely open.

The cool thing about it is that this also works really well with the current neural network based recommendation systems since they output a weighting of things. Simply transform those weightings into a nice output and the user can see exactly what's going on and exactly how they're being viewed. As a nice aside this would also remove a big chunk of the incentive for increasingly aggressive spying as companies try to get ever more extensive profiles on each and every person that uses their products.

One downside here is that users might not be consciously aware of their own preferences. This could again be resolved transparently. "Hey PhilWelch, we've noticed you like videos about underwater basketweaving. Would you like for this interest to be ticked in your profile? [Yes, No, No + Never ask again]

Not to mention a completely different topic - ads for scams. When I create a new ad on FB, they keep it in review for at least a couple of hours. But every day I see dozens of ads that are obviously dishonest. Some financial scams, ads for some fishy schemes, some of them badly translated.

When you are a publisher and accept an ad, obviously it's very tempting to claim all responsibility is with the advertiser (it is not, although details vary between jurisdictions). But even if you didn't have any responsibility legally, it still feels terribly wrong from the ethical point of view to get rich by helping scammers cheat some poor chaps of their money.

Different topic, but the strangest thing I witnessed on youtube was ads for audible during a stolen audible book... So the owner of the content payed the thief (indirectly, but still) for placing an ad during performance of the stolen content. And youtube couldn't care less, as long as money moves...

It often gets it wrong, but that's the general idea, isn't it? You don't customize it by checking some boxes or adding some keywords, you customize it by giving attention to some results more than to others.

Obviously, there's the added layer that they aren't optimizing for your satisfaction but for your business value to them.

IMO this is a moat in the eye of a lot of libertarian tech philosophy. Most software products become competitive by building networks -- with end users (e.g. social networks), with developers (e.g. open source), or indirectly via content (from media aggregators to spam filtering). Once you're in the business of curating a network, you are implementing values whether you acknowledge them or not.

There's another problem: it becomes a race to the bottom if it's nothing but trolls and garbage content.

I subscribe to a lot of history channels so I've seen the effects of this filtering directly, history contains a lot of talk about nazis and hitler and you can't even mention the big H without being demonetized.

But this is just another example of how advertising is a cancer on society.

I don't understand the problem. Why can't Toyota or Proctor and Gamble say it only wants to bid on a certain white list of channels or videos? The only downside is a smaller reach for the advertiser and a smaller "pie" for the "content" company (be it Instagram or YouTube).

I think the main problem is the "content providers" be it Instagram or YouTube want to maximize the ad revenue and any suggestion I have such as strictly reverse chronological timeline by default goes against the idea of "growth hacking".

I would personally love to be a fly in the wall in Netflix or Spotify headquarters. Because in my naive mind, Netflix makes MORE money when people subscribe to Netflix but never watch anything. But then if people watch Netflix a lot, they are more likely to talk about what they watch to others and encourage others to subscribe to Netflix?

Any company probably wants to make sure they make more money the more customers they have? Kind of sounds obvious but I don't think it is the case with every company. I'd imagine there are some businesses where there is an ideal size and if you are bigger, the additional customers kind of follow a law of diminishing returns? I can't think of any examples but would love to hear if anyone reading this can...

The thing is, sometime around 2012-2014 this became unacceptable. Public discourse shifted into "silence is complicitness - if you allow this speech on your platform, that means that you endorse it." So it became a forced-choice issue. And the thing is that if it's a forced choice, very few people are going to stand up and defend Nazis. Most of these tech execs personally hold fairly liberal, progressive views. When the general public said "You're a Nazi sympathizer because you show Nazi websites in the search results", a.) it wasn't true and b.) it was personally insulting, because that was essentially the opposite of what actually was true.

And then once that started happening, you run into the age-old problem with restricting freedom of speech, which is that the people who hold the power to restrict it might not agree with you on what's worth restricting. Be careful what you wish for.

It leads to the "deplatforming" approach, i.e. not only refusing to provide a neutral publishing platform (or assimilated-related tools), but also to actively fight against those who do so.

'Be careful what you wish for', indeed.

Public discourse? Or the loudest segment of the discourse most influential on Googlers?

I agree with your account in every way, but one and I recognize that I might be wrong about it.

In my opinion, it was not public discourse that shifted first. Instead, in my opinion, it was advertiser choice to not have their ads shown alongside certain content be it search results, YouTube videos, tweets, Facebook posts, or whatever else these tech companies were carrying.

I believe that ignoring advertiser preferences in this discussion is harmful in that ignores their impact on both business choices and public discourse such well-meaning commenters here end up talking past each other needlessly.

If we consider the role of advertisers in this discussion, then the comparison of these tech companies to telephone, radio, and newspapers becomes more interesting if not more apt. The advertisers don’t have any sort of explicit freedom of association given to them by the tech companies about what kinds of content they are allowed to associate with, but the point becomes moot with advertisers being customers allowed to take their business anywhere.

1. Taking the comparison of telephone, what if there was a phone service that provided free calls with the caveat that the caller or the receiver had to listen to an ad? What if that had was in some way, shape or form related to past or present telephone conversations? I would personally find this feature annoying to have some third-party delay my conversation, but I can see where this might be useful for people who would not otherwise be able to afford the service. I assume that most people who use telephones would feel similarly to myself.

2. The comparison to radio, newspapers, and television is less interesting in that both mediums are essentially curated, but both do run ads and/or sell subscriptions. Some of them even offer services that come about from gaining expertise in their domains or being in close proximity to content creators in their respective mediums (record labels, television and movie studios, recommendation sites, marketing firms, public relations experts, etc.), which in turn can be funded by subscriptions, ads, or investments.

Consequently, there are similarities between these media. First of all, these tech companies offer services that allow ordinary people to broadcast themselves to a wide audience much like radio or newspapers. Second of all, these tech companies make a majority of their incomes from a combination ads and subscriptions. Third of all, users of Facebook, Twitter, Google and the like have conversational expectations much like those of telephone conversations: even the people working in radio, newspapers, and television feel really strongly negative when any other party tries to change their message or silence them.

Like some of the other commenters here, I too feel that these tech companies have made a mistake in policing content the way they do. I believe that they did so to this degree wholly to appease advertisers. Had they been laser-focused on preserving the integrity of what their users posted before the demands their advertisers then things could have been very different.

If I was an advertiser and I only wanted to show ads to people who like cat pictures, but absolutely never show those ads to people like pictures of other animals even if there are pictures of cats in some of those pictures then these tech companies should build the tool for that.

In my opinion, these tech companies should be even more of a transparent marketplace between the ad buyers and content producers and the free association that both these groups are allowed to have with other and not police or manipulate content or that is permissible by law (keep things chronological with a user being able to keep a list of favourites). Then this whole discussion would boil down to which set of advertisers pulled sponsorship from which set of content producers and vice versa.

Yes, this is all easier said than done. Yes, the thing that it would all boil down to is potentially a problem in itself. Yes, these tech companies still have to follow laws that can be in conflict with laws elsewhere or some set of values in general. Yes, people would still take tech companies over something else related or not.

But, at least then, we wouldn’t we talking about this.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/google-fined-e2-42bn-for-e...

But this is really a digression. The point is that search rank does promote. We can come up with many cases where Google perhaps shouldn't display the most relevant results. The question is whether Google should use their near-monopoly to influence the world via search results according to their moral code instead of strict legal responsibility.

Likewise can we all please give the open farce of abuse of the word "monopoly" to rest?

Google is a great service (that I love and use daily by choice) but they also spend a lot of money to make sure they are the default search provider. They have more means than smaller search companies and they use those means to achieve almost total market share. Then Google used their vast market share to skew business in their favor. That is almost the textbook definition of monopolistic behavior.

And over a hundred years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that “seperate but equal” was a valid argument. Doesn’t make it correct.

If you want the analogy to make sense, you'd have to use something that's more of a broadcasting platform, like TV or radio, or a magazine.

Group X that we don't like gets its phone service from AT&T. We know they're conducting their hateful business, fundraising, and coordination over AT&T's service. We need to put pressure on AT&T to cut off their service, or we'll assume that AT&T endorses their message.

There are very obviously plenty of businesses where we'd expect people to cut off hateful organizations from service. I imagine most party caterers wouldn't want to host the KKK, and nobody would think this unreasonable.

FB Messenger censors pornhub links or at least it did a few years ago.

I believe radio (as in ham radio) actually has FCC rules regarding identification and profanity.

In particular, note that in the public resource analogy the regulation is quite neutral; legal censorship of profanity in the US is very narrow.

First off, in the world of VOIP and conference calls this isn't true anymore, and we still don't censor VOIP providers.

The point is you can choose to be a carrier or you can chose to be a service.

It’s fairly clear how these organisations and their internet powered machination work.

So let’s talk about them in that context.

Postal service is more akin to the infrastructure of radio/TV/newspaper (which differs, and is rather not one but various, e.g. cable, FM, and paperboys).

The analogy with Internet would be transit providers. The undersea cables between US and EU, for example. These are heavily logged, e.g. by UK. Imagine all your post be scanned, that'd be GDR-esque.

When you post something on Twitter, unless your account is private, you've broadcasted your speech to anyone in the world who cares to see it.

Not moderating any speech at all is a quick way to allow a community to turn into a cesspit of spam and trolling. Look at any web board or forum over the past several decades for inspiration. They either have moderation, or they get overrun.

There are millions of Twitter accounts in Japanese, but if you don’t follow any of them, and nobody you follow retweets them, you’d never know they exist. You can also block or mute specific accounts, mute keywords, etc for even finer control.

That's not at all true by default; you also see tweets from people that have paid for involuntary reach for the tweet (promoted tweets), tweets that people you follow have interacted with, tweets that respond to or mention people you follow, and probably others that I'm forgetting.

Agreed that Twitter isn't a message board, but that's a much closer analogy than calling it a phone call.

If that was true, that would help a lot.

Well, Twitter is Twitter. But Twitter is probably closer to a message board than it is to a phone call.

But those boards are moderated by people who are part of the community. Not by the software nor the software host.

Twitter, FB, Google are not part of those communities. If they want to be cesspit of spam and trolling they should be free to do so.

A platform should be open, and only illegal stuff should be removed. No preferences, no nothing.

A publisher can be closed, can be whatever they want it, can filter whatever, promote whatever and censor whatever.

...but!

If you're a publisher, you've decided what to publish, and you should be responsible for all content published on your webpage. Fake news? Illegal porn? Nuclear bomb plans? Your problem, your responsiblity, you face the consequences.

If you want to be an open platform and blame users for content posted there (and have them face the consequences), then you should have no right to promote, censor or block/hide content (except illegal).

In western societies, this debate is relevant and I strongly side with the poster you replied to. That being said, reasonably unbiased filtering should probably be allowed in some form. For example, while I don't want YouTube picking sides politically, I also wouldn't want to force them to host hardcore pornography against their will.

The smart thing to say would have been 'we're common carriers'. And then to actually behave like common carriers.. At least that would have gotten them to first base. Now they look like heavy handed censors with a stake in the game.

The bottom line is, that G/FB/Tw did not remain neutral, because that hurt the aforementioned bottom line. Now, of course - as you said/transcribed - the problem is that if fascism becomes profitable then what?

Facebook, Google (YouTube), and Twitter have historically claimed to be “neutral tech platforms” like phone utilities or internet service providers. They maintained that claim so that responsibility for content would be on the user/sharer and so they could avoid regulation.

More recently, at least Facebook has claimed (2018) it is a “publisher”. They updated their claim in order to justify the right to editorialize & choose what content people see on Facebook.

The shift to “publisher” aligns with the reality that the news feed algorithm is a form of editorializing. The algorithm decides what you see. It doesn’t matter if a human or a computer is making the decision.

Furthermore this whole "publisher" vs "platform" argument is not nearly as relevant as people make it seem. Contrary to popular belief, tech companies describing themselves as publishers instead of platforms does not affect the fact that they are not held liable for user generated content (so long as they meet reasonable standards for taking it down when notified). The New York Times is afforded the same protection for user generated content that they host (e.g. their comments section).

Why people are dedicating so much attention to the fact that Facebook calls itself a publisher is a mystery to me.

See https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230 for more details.

I would call it outright propaganda at this point because the dogged insistence on not listening to objective facts seems more "big lie" style opinion shaping than mere ignorance which has caught on. At this point I reflexive downvote all who repeat it uncritically as "fact".

Which is fine, and good, except when algorithms keyed only to engagement cause the noisiest, most provocative and potentially divisive content to be amplified.

We have, for a very long time, had laws concerning appropriate behaviour in a town square, or any other 'public' setting: don't incite riots, don't behave violently towards others, be respectful if someone doesn't want to talk and walks away. I support the efforts we're now seeing to bring those norms into online spaces.

That's a great way to lose users though. They need to provide some limit for abuse. That means either good moderation tools for end-user (which I don't see how they could scale without also providing bad-people-lists) or moderation on their side. Otherwise you end up with /b/ or worse.

If they want their users (and advertisers) to stay, they need to filter content. They're social networks, not limited-scope opt-in party lines.

If social media platforms are picking the next congressmen and next president, and you’re in Congress vying to keep your seat, do you really want to introduce or sponsor legislation to upset these companies?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610395

The cynical Regulatory Capture inspired take is that they want to be regulated now. Because regulation always favors the established players and makes it very hard for newcomers to overthrow them.

Google, FB etc are now big and old enough to need that protection, and settle in to comfortable corporate middle age.

There are many expressions you can't publicly present by law. For example, copyright infringement, privacy infringement, pornography, national/personal/organization secret, fraud, malware and all. You may argue some of them are ridiculous, but there are some expression you agree to be supressed. Like the fake news of you committing the crime.

Yes, In an ideal rule of the law world, you should take the court order to censor that expression. But it takes time. The current law is, if you knowingly publish the material that is obviously illegal and ignore the censorship demand, you are responsible for that.

It is not possible to do that and make as much money as google, fb, etc. The end result of unmoderated public places on the internet is always this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...

Which is great! But not for making money. From that article:

> Allowing any aspect of your brand to come anywhere near something unpopular and taboo is like a giant Christmas present for people who hate you [...] It doesn’t matter if taboo material makes up 1% of your comment section; it will inevitably make up 100% of what people hear about your comment section and then of what people think is in your comment section.

Exactly. This is a choice that companies need to make. Or a regulation coming.

My philosophy is to always be suspicious of those grabbing at the keys to power - they are up to no good.

They had to switch their story because they are not a neutral carrier. They prefer some messages over others. This is linked to their revenue model.

The simplest solution to 'just be infrastructure' is to show all messages linearly.

A more complex solution with possibly lower revenue is this: they could let the users pick algorithms to filter and sort the content, then they could claim to be infrastructure again. The user would need to be able to inspect the algorithms. The simplest one would be: no sorting, no filtering. That would make the sites unpleasant.

The smart people at Google, Facebook, and Twitter must have considered this option but decided that it is more profitable to share the power over what people see with the regulators than to share it with the people.

Whinging of the poorly informed that free speech protections can only apply to the government aside.

The result of this short-sighted crusade was Youtube becoming unprofitable for millions of small creators around the world, and people of all sides of politics suffering including non-political LGBT creators.

Basically anything war seems to be getting demonetized these days. Advertisers only want to appear next to cats on roombas.

That concept exists within our system.

Facebook must choose between being a “platform” like a phone company and being a “publisher” like a newspaper or broadcaster.

The rules are different and the accountability is different, which is why Fb lawyers spent years and millions arguing for “platform” status.

Edit: my main goal for posting my comment is to prevent some startup on HN from reading the parent & deciding to classify itself as a “publisher” only to find later that was a huge mistake. I’m not a lawyer & they shouldn’t take my advice, but hopefully they’ll at least double check with someone who is.

Interestingly the underlying assumptions in most analyses like this is that everyone lives in US and obeys US laws. What if China goes after a political dissident through Facebook? Even worse, what if Facebook propaganda is used to incite genocide by the government of Myanmar? Where do you get the court order to take it down?

Unfortunately the business model of Silicon Valley is at odds with this simplistic first-amendment/court-order sort of argument.

Even better! Stop trying to act like global companies, and pick a jurisdiction to work out of. If Facebook is an American company (which they are), they are held to and follow US laws.

Maybe this means that Facebook doesn't remove Nazi propaganda because of the US 1st Amendment. What follows is actual proper competition, perhaps Germany bans Facebook, which means either a new German company GesichtBuch, can compete by being based in Germany and following german laws. Or, people enjoy Facebook and then rally their government for laws to be changed.

What we have now is companies trying to exist in every country, which means they have to follow the worst laws of every country.

It's not going to happen, because people can connect to FB easily using a vpn without giving FB the chance to monetize ads. It's already happening in countries that have banned FB.

Companies are trying to make money. That's the purpose of a company.

It’s not the size of the market that should determine right or wrong. Having free speech laws means you get democracy and nazi stuff and spend time on more important stuff as to what’s too nazi or too democratic. Just rely on the rule of law.

There's no way the three could have predicted the show that would have been put on today.

Just like we couldn't have predicted the massive impact iphones/android [steve jobs + android] would have had in the past decade on today's society.

My two cents, i guess.

I think that works better on paper than in practice. If I get offended enough by something, can't I go try to sue under the premise of defamation?

Libel, slander, and harassment are all crimes or civil offenses (illegal). They work pretty well.

The problem has been lock-in and users unable to "take their network with them."

The idea of decentralization to me is being fully mobile and having the decision to be able to choose what network(s) you're part of, and in part that would be based on leadership, governance, rules that each platform can have in place - and ideally enforcing and evolving as necessary.

Imagine you could have Facebook but immediately you can decide who's leadership you're following for moderation and all other settings/decisions of the platform - and thus who your attention, money, goes to.

The government being in charge of moderating free speech - except for perhaps acting along with, setting rules for authority like police - is going to be very inefficient, bureaucratic, not leveraging the efficiencies of free market systems, capitalism.

Government could potentially play an important role, however private sector options are likely to exist sooner and be better. Let people choose who moderates their community, networks, allow the best options to naturally rise to the top - to act as role models for competitors to take notice and attempt to mimic the best parts.

Twitter is not like telephone (except direct messages I suppose).

A more apt comparison would be newspapers (which have publishers and editorial staff) or radio/TV (with similar structures).

So the analogy only really works if you claim something like “Twitter should have been like paper mills“, but I’m not sure whether that’s the right analogy or useful way of thinking about Twitter.

Sometimes things are just complex and I do actually think it’s wrong for Twitter to run away from this responsibility. They are the ones who want to run this public-facing way of communicating as a capitalist enterprise, they should be beholden to doing it right (whatever that means – but that’s the hard part and it’s ok that it’s hard).

A better (though still imperfect) analogy really is media: TV stations, newspapers, magazines, radio stations. And indeed you see similar problems there as the online media companies are facing now. The biggest difference is that traditional media companies were forced to make editorial choices because of physical constraints - physical space for print, airtime and spectrum for TV and radio - so this question of whether you could just let anyone say anything in your publication or on your broadcast just never really came up.

Refusing to serve a customer when you disagree with that customer's goal is pretty far from being a "moral arbiter for society." Keep in mind that anyone is free to use other services (or roll their own) and gitlab can't do anything about that. Neither would it be overreaching for the workers building that product to request a say in how it's used.

> If these users are breaking laws, then put them out of business via the courts and sieze the assets (the repos in this case) via legal means.

Refusing someone a service you provide is a completely legal action. This has never been illegal afaik. In many cases I can think of the users wouldn't be actually breaking any laws, which isn't the same as saying that their actions aren't immoral.

> The tech unicorns screwed themselves over BIG TIME, the second they stopped claiming they were just infrastructure and platforms and got into content moderation. They will now forever be a pawn of whoever has some power and has some agenda.

In this last sentence, who are you claiming has power? It seems to me if I had power I wouldn't bother trying to persuade my boss not to do business with certain agencies, I'd just make it illegal and force them to change. Does that seem like a course of action available to gitlab employees?

I think this is the crux of the issue. Anyone is of course free to roll their own GitLab (or facebook, or news channel). But this ignores reality.

Facebook control ~90% of social media. There's a very high chance that Facebook could sway every election in America (and lots of other countries also) if they truly wanted to.

I think we are entering a new era. Just as it required a paradigm shift to outlaw anti-competitive practices, I think we need to re-consider what rights these platforms have around speech.

True libertarianism dictates that I can ban whomever I want from my shop. But in reality most of the bans were of the 'No Negroes' variety. I would love to think that the free market would take care of discriminatory businesses, but history shows it will not.

I agree that the true issue is ultimately monopoly: if a town has 10 newspapers and one goes democrat-leaning, no one would really care. But it's different if there is only 1 newspaper.

I worry that there can only ever be a single Friendster/Google+/Myspace around, because people will always gravitate towards the most popular one.

Now try to apply US anti trust laws to it.

Of course, those who make the "publisher or platform, pick one!" false dichotomy aren't really genuinely concerned about the size of the company. They just want to force someone to host their content, which is why they jump to "free speech means more nowadays than what it says in the constitution [so platforms must carry my speech]."

Sorry for the tangent, just want to make sure my position is clear.

It is not nice to lump us all together. Many of us here both

- despise certain content

- while we still find it totally unacceptable that tech giants are allowed to do whatever they want with their power "because hate speech"

This is just a variant of introducing bad laws "because of terrorism":

The laws are bad not because anyone wants terrorism but because we don't want anybody to be punished without a good reason.

And today as tech giants wields more power than many courts or - in many but obviously not all ways - even small countries it might be time to make sure they have to be careful with that power.

No one is forcing all businesses to do serve all customers everywhere always. We are saying you can't discriminate on the basis of marginalized groups.

Source? That doesn't really match the numbers I've seen. Especially not for younger people.

Not quite 90% by that measure, but close.

https://www.dreamgrow.com/top-15-most-popular-social-network...

Mindshare, reach, time-on-site, and media references are alternate measures. Definitions matter.

But I realise now that isn't the right definition... still not sure what the word is for the Friendster/MySpace clones--but among those I am pretty sure Facebook is more than 90% of the market (outside of China), possibly more than 99% with Google+ closing.

They might not be 90+ everywhere, but they do own a significant amount

But I realise now that isn't the right definition... still not sure what the word is for the Friendster/MySpace clones--but among those I am pretty sure Facebook is more than 90% of the market (outside of China), possibly more than 99% with Google+ closing.

This sounds really good until someone refuses to bake a wedding cake for a couple because they're gay. The supreme court ruled in favor of the baker. You're advocating for a world where that's ok. Is that the world you want to live in?

If on the other hand the company is a monopoly and no reasonable alternatives are available, then it is de-facto infrastructure and should be more stringently regulated for impartiality, as is the government (and frankly such companies are a problem anyway, and should possibly be adopted by the government when they reach that size). The DMV isn't allowed to turn you away for a swastika tattoo, and neither should the electric company. But a baker? Absolutely.

Laws are often made to protect minorities, because history shows us time and time again that an unchecked majority of people can be real dicks.

Under democracy, a majority of people can decide what laws there are, and inflict their dickishness as they wish. Laws are often made to oppress minorities. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

See also part I of this essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-p...

> Under democracy, a majority of people can decide what laws there are

Also worth pointing out that under most democracies, this isn't true. The people decide which people should decide what laws there should be. It's an important difference.

And it doesn't cause any trouble. B2B is not concerned obviously.

Of course companies have to offer products to minorities, have you ever seen parking spots for handicapped people in the mall?

Of course a restaurant has to ask you if you have some intolerance before serving you food that could contain allergens.

USA Better start to learn that 300 millions people don't make the entire world.

That's not what the Supreme Court ruled. They ruled that the CO commissioners who decided against the baker in the first place were being blatantly flippant about the baker's religious beliefs. They should have at least considered those beliefs. They explicitly did not rule that the baker's religious beliefs were enough on their own to prevent the sale.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2018/06/opinion-analysis-court-ru...

I would want the black baker owner to be able to not only refuse to bake the cake, but to also tell the customer to take a hike and never return.

No. Because "supports the confederacy" isn't a protected class.

As far as US law goes, you can generally refuse a service to anyone for any reason, unless that reason is related to a protected class to which the person belongs, unless you have some other exception (almost always religious) for not doing the thing.

Protected class does also not mean that everyone else if a free target for discrimination, and for international companies there is the European Convention on Human Rights. Refusing service based on politics require the company to do a quite complicated dance around a long list of laws and I doubt any company lawyer would be very happy to give a green light for it.

This is a fun game! Suppose the baker is Muslim and you ask for a cake with a cartoon of The Prophet? Wouldn’t that make you the bigot?

My point is you can contrive any example here to get the conclusion you want.

The whole case was a ridiculous hit job.

That's not actually at issue in the Colorado case. "I will not sell you that cake because you're gay" is the issue, not the type of cake.

This contradicts everything I've read about the case. The baker disagreed with gay marriage, not being gay. To suggest that the baker wouldn't have sold any cake to a gay customer is ridiculous.

The only exception should be legal monopolies; they shouldn't be allowed to discriminate, because there are otherwise no other options.

This was not the conclusion of the SCOTUS case.

It pushed the case back down to the State on procedural consideration.

We also have a bunch of reasons (protected classes) that a company cannot refuse to do business. Colorado specifically includes sexual orientation in their definition of protected classes.

I don't think this is relevant to this specific case. The baker didn't refuse to do business with the gay couple. He was happy to sell them a generic off-the-shelf wedding cake.

He refused to sell them a personalized cake, which is considered a form of expression. The government cannot compel you to express yourself a certain way if it goes against your religious beliefs.

If you're talking about the Masterpiece Cakeshop baker, he didn't say that until the lawsuit was in-progress. At the time that the couple went in, he refused to serve them without discussing what they wanted.

I would absolutely support adding sexual orientation to that list in every state, or at the federal level. But if it's not there in the bakers' state, then, legally, they are (unfortunately) in the clear.

So you're fine with "whites only" signs in shops?

Hope that doesn't sound too extreme but while I understand where you're coming from I think it's important to acknowledge where the rhetoric about not distinguishing your customers based on their personal characteristics comes from.

There are a couple cases being heard by the Supreme Court right now that are attempting to argue that discrimination against gay and transgender people is inherently discrimination based on sex (which is a protected class everywhere in the US); I'm very interested in how that turns out.

Anyways I think your point is mainly that there is a line between what is required of a business and what constitutes a right to self-determination / self-expression. Where to draw that line is certainly not obvious and we understand new things about it as society progresses. So in that sense I do understand your point of view, and I happen to agree that certain decisions regarding what work they take should be allowed by a business, but I hope the point has been made that you have to be careful what you wish for when stating absolutes like "for whatever reason they choose."

That's not what the Supreme Court found; it has not invalidated public accommodation anti-discrimination law in general, nor even the specific law the State relied on in the case. It did rule that the specific procedural history of the case indicated that State officials acted with specific targeted religious animus in the case, invalidating the state enforcement action even if the law was Constitutional and the enforcement factually warranted under it otherwise.

For example today we've seen Google terminate a service of distributing an app on AppStore because it disagreed with a developer having a donation link, despite that not being excluded in ToS (or so I heard). And it doesn't really matter, how you company refuses a service. ToS just makes reasons for refusal codified and ToS can change at any time.

This is already a world we live in, SV companies practice this daily, and I doubt tech companies want this to change.

Moral arbiter is society at any rate. Tech workers are part of society, and their companies can't really make rules like you suggested (no service for gays) at scale without getting a major backlash from the public, or internally. Or if they could, it would indicate a much wider societal acceptance for such rules.

I still don't know what would be an effective solution to this problem, but giving these giants the same freedom to do whatever as a small business enjoys just feels wrong.

The civil rights movement and suffrage prove this is patently untrue. The biggest difference is that gender, religion and ethnicity are easy things to point out, while ideologic belief systems are tricky.

Where do you draw the line on what grounds a business can refuse service? Should I be able to refuse service to republicans? How about amputees? I hate the color yellow, so I'm not going to sell to anyone with an outfit on that has that color. I live in Los Angeles, where it's still plenty common to see signs saying "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service" - which, btw, is not aimed at scantily clad beach goers but targets the poor and homeless population. Same with silly dress codes around baggy pants and hats - all clear examples of bullshit rules intended to single out an "undesirable" customer. Except it's not race/religions/gender so it's cool, right?

I'm in the camp that the reasons businesses should have to refuse service should be a whitelist, not a blacklist.

So if you sell cakes for €10 and I show up and hand you €10 you are not legally allowed to refuse to sell me that cake. (heads have rolled for less...)

This is pretty effective at preventing discrimination that may otherwise be difficult to prove.

You're thinking in terms of fighting the last war. Companies of today know how to work around things at risk becoming illegal. Today, a more effective strategy to persuade your boss about an issue is to spin it as something outrageous on social media, in hope that news portals will pick it up. This power is very much available to a Gitlab employee.

I think we're getting to the core of it here. [The law's opinion isn't clear yet, but it appears to lean in this direction.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...) GitLab's decision may not be adequate - but it could help dodge a bullet or two while the law sorts itself out.

> "The problem with the whole 'activism' mindset is it doesn't actually target the people who created the problem, it just creates lots of noise – and the problem with noise is facts get lost," Fellows said.

The responsible thing to do is to refuse to play ball. If they claimed to be actively vetting content and something slipped through the cracks, it could be more legitimately portrayed as an endorsement than something that occurred with a Laissez-Faire policy in place.

This is similar rhetoric to what people would have used to justify segregated restaurants and schools. I'm not saying you sympathize with this but there is a reason why we don't want public businesses turning people away for political speech or other categories. It's not a nice place to end up as a society.

You can make an argument that some sites have moderated too much, or been too overtly political.

But every community moderates, and has to. This can be demonstrated with a simple example. Guess what isn't illegal? Spam!

It should be obvious that FB and Twitter etc have to take spam down though.

Then there's abusive behaviour. Stalking, harassment, etc. Often not illegal, but hurts a platform. Better take that down.

What about propaganda? They should let it all go? That sure sounds like a....phone network. Actually wait, it sounds more like the news media, which has been regulated for decades. A zero moderation policy would likely have led to demands for regulation, too.

And then there's the massive category of topics which are not illegal, but horrifying. Have zero moderation, and you end up as 4chan or worse.

--------

I'm generally in favour of keeping politics out of things, but your "we take stuff down only for a court order" is a naive view. Literally every forum moderates, they have no choice.

they'd have a regulatory shield and probably retain carrier status, rather than sticking their necks out by selectively moderating content.

a moderate amount of moderation is my preference, but i see the value in freer speech zones on the internet (that i can mostly ignore).

This has come to a head as plarforms have grown larger. Note that even if some platforms were strictly neutral, they'd still be affected by the changes the government is proposing. It would have been very unlikely that none of the major platforms would have moderated beyond legal minimums.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...

seems like a lot of lawsuts and not a lot of legislating, from the wiki.

Why would companies find that preferable to moderating themselves? If the government makes laws prohibiting that stuff, then that means the companies could get in trouble if they let any of that through. If companies self-moderate, then there will be less pressure for laws like that to exist, and the companies won't get hit with penalties for missing a few things here and there.

But, as graeme has pointed out, this idea of any moderation increasing a platform's liability is as wrong as it is widespread.

Spam, pornography, and profanity are not viewpoints. The problem with social media is not censorship of unwanted content that an ordinary person can identify without reference to viewpoint. What bothers civil libertarians, myself included, is censorship of specific points of view, even when these points of view are expressed in a calm and civil manner.

> Horrifying

Who gets to decide what's horrifying? You? Why?

Is this actually occurring? I haven't seen anyone get deplatformed because the company disagrees with the message, but rather because they violated ToS with regard to how they were communicating their message.

Similarly any business ends up making moral choices. It's unavoidable. To act in the world is to have impact. To consciously act is to intend particular impact. Commerce is inherently social; you choose to serve certain people in certain ways, with particular outcomes intended. These choices are inherently moral.

The notion that we should ignore that sometimes is of course a strongly political view. And when it pretends to be non-political, I think it's also incoherent.

And that simply flies in the face of common sense. Only the most hardcore post-modernist would deny that the NRA is a more political organization than the IETF. So obviously some dimension of "politicization" exists beyond just "acting in the world".

And if an organization wants to be less political, one way to do so is by relying less on political considerations when making decisions. With "political" simply meaning topics that are widely and commonly considered to be political. In the same way that the NRA is widely and commonly considered to be political in a way that the IETF is not.

You can debate about whether it actually is a lofty goal for an organization to strive to be non-political. Certainly there are many counter-arguments for why organizations should be more political. But I don't think you can deny that the dimension exists in some meaningful and actionable way unless you completely throw common sense out the window.

To strive to be "non-political" is an intensely political position. It's basically a complete support of the status quo.

To not take a stand on a position is as much of a position as taking a stand. We live in this world. It's literally impossible to disengage.

Not saying anything, or not disagreeing is as much a statement as saying something, or disagreeing. Neutrality is a political position. Deal with it.

----

The IETF is absolutely a political organization, but it's focus is in areas where there is much less discord and a general interest in actual practical problem solving, with hard, measurable outcomes, so there's much less room for gaming of facts. Go look at the discussion of any contentious RFC if you don't agree. Just because it's not advocating a extreme viewpoint that's completely divorced from reality (as the NRA is) doesn't make it "less political", it just makes it less contentious.

I've seen many people spout this off as if it's self-evident, and I can't for the life of me understand why.

The status quo isn't some neutral, natural resting state that will continue on until otherwise affected, it needs to be _constantly_ maintained.

Being non-political doesn't maintain the status quo, because maintaining the status quo is an _active_ endeavour, in the same way a plane doesn't keep flying forever just because its engines turn off.

- putting a stop on political discussion at the workplace

- making it clear in the handbook as a matter of policy that gitlab will sell to whomever they legally can

- sending a clear signal that any time spend on considering not to do so and expressing an alternative opinion is seen as a violation of the values of gitlab and waste of time

- engaging in commercial activity with anybody, assuming you don't rip them off and they actually benefit from it, can also be seen as support in a very weak sense

However, 'support' also has the meaning of condoning. It's like a bystander not taking action when somebody is sexually harassed. You don't say he actively caused the harassment but his lack of action betrays an implicit support.

As an obvious examples, the American Revolution was clearly more active. And surely the revolutionaries were seen as more "political" than people who just wanted to go about their lives. Said lives of course including a variety of actions that directly or indirectly supported British rule.

Even the advocates don't take it literally usually because of how barking mad that would be in a "strangle infants for not supporting the cause" way. But that isn't special because any philsophy can be twisted into something horrific.

I suspect its popularity is more for the memetic effectiveness than a deep philosophy - regardless if it is right.

This is exactly the point. It's impossible for an org to be non-political. Any choice made has wider socitial context and effects for the workers at that company. Politics is basically the effect of decisions on people. Not all political decisions are as extreme and sensational as NRA etc. most are mundane but still important.

Your definition of this political spectrum seems to be focused on politics that generate controversy rather than their importance or number of people they effect. Mundane politics are also politics, you just don't necessarily notice them

GitLab has to define what are acceptable politics to discuss and draw that line. This is a decision that has to be made and will be based on their political views and what they think is normal or extreme which won't be the same for everyone who works there. The whole thing just seems very naive.

The current American notion of "nonpolitical" is based on a post-WWII period where there was a broad consensus on a bunch of issues, and I think that consensus was in large part driven by the moral clarity provided by the war. But that started to decline circa 1980: https://xkcd.com/1127/large/

It was still propped up for a while by common interests between southern Democrats and non-northeastern Republicans. A big common interest being an opposition to civil rights. But most of the blue dog Democrats are now Republicans and liberal Republicans are basically extinct, so that middle ground has basically vanished.

For you "common sense" is doing a ton of work here, as is "widely considered". But as far as I can tell, it's tautological. You want your priors (or those of dominant groups) to be considered nonpolitical, while those of others to be political.

> claiming that any act that has any impact on anyone is political

What is politics if not people regulating the impacts we have on one another? Of societies deciding whose pain and whose gain is most important?

I think people conflate 'I don't want to think about this' with 'I am neutral and not a party in this issue'.

Everyone's life is effected by politics and GitLab is making a political decision as to which politics are acceptable to discuss at work. Politics will still be discussed, but only the politics that those deciding deem acceptable and this inherently political.

Me either! The point is everyone should be the arbiter of morality for society. Abstaining from moral judgements because it's "inefficient" is just alibistic, and leaves society worse as a whole. Tech companies are participating in society just as any other company, there's no reason they should be exempt from ethical considerations.

Technology is not neutral, never was, and pretending it is isn't going to change it - it's just going to pave the way for "inevitable" unethical programs and moral lapses (see: mass surveillance, Amazon->Ring cooperation, ICE cooperation...)

Companies and people “being moral arbiters” of everyone they interact with is just idiots making knee jerk reactions based on other people’s perceptions and opinions.

An employee at a software company knows far to little to meaningfully judge if ICE should be helped. Are you even aware of the duties of the ICE?

They built these services. They are, ate least in part, responsible for how they work and the consequences of what they built. The content they’re serving and data has a meaning to us.

You can’t pretend that a social network doesn’t have a role in bringing anti-vaxxers together and enabling them to organize.

You can’t pretend that an advertising platform doesn’t have a role in distributing misleading information by business or other interests.

> If these users are breaking laws...

Laws aren’t the ultimate arbiter of everything. There’s a reason they change and evolve over time. Personal responsibility is not a law, yet we expect everyone to have some.

Advertising sends a message to groups of people.

Roads allow people to travel by car.

Roads are being uses to bring people to places where murders happen. You can't pretend that roads have no role.

So many things had a role.. power, internet, the company who made the computer they used, teachers, friends (or lack of), parents.. why decidd that social media or ads is the problem.

Social media has reduced the number of cults.

We can always replace words in other peoples’ statements to make them sound silly, but I’ll roll with it.

What if these roads provided, as part of the government’s offering, rest stops and gathering points exclusively for murderers? — Just like how a social network allows problematic groups people to gather and enable them.

What if certain schools accepted money from anyone and in exchange taught kids any curriculum, including murder? — Just how some services bombard people with outright lies, because special interests pay them to.

If your service has a massive reach and influence you can’t just say “nope, we don’t do politics”. It’s simply not honest.

What similar controls do we have for social media? An institutionalised system for silencing people which is euphemistically called “suspending users reported for harassment” which is just a formalised lynch mob.

It’s actually perfectl content for the internet especially for the really out-there interviewees, because people inside the relevant filter bubble can watch and feel their beliefs are being validated, and someone outside can watch and be entertained by a freak show. Each person can watch the same content and be entertained for their own purposes. I’m not sure how healthy it is for society though.

However, the bigger problem is that companies with international presence are going to have an increasingly difficult time navigating legal sanctions or directives from the various countries they may sell to or operate in.

The challenge comes when a company is faced with being closed out of a large market if they don't comply with another country's legal directives. While, the best/right answer might be to ignore those countries, the reality of having to withdraw from valuable markets would be challenging.

Though, while it may seem like new problem, non-digital industries have been dealing with this kind of thing for a long time. Maybe the WTO, or the like, will develop fair trade/IP regime to guard against enabling a country to block or sanction international digital/media companies for violating local laws. But I wouldn't expect anything like to happen soon because countries are not to keen on giving up sovereignty.

Maybe spontaneous digital trade wars will become a thing.

edit: typo as usual

Lots of people don’t care or don’t have time to evaluate the thousands or millions of customers using software. The evaluation never ends so even if you shut off the really bad one, there will be another.

Picking a legal limit let’s me focus on other things.

Also, what’s so bad about common whores? Whores are people too, I try not to judge people based on their chosen profession.

If you want to decide what to build go into business for yourself. If you're working for someone else you have the choice to either work for them and do what they want or quit.

That's not the way this works. He's free to find work that agrees with him or make his own work. But this "I want to work for you and decide what I work on" is a non starter for most people

If you think unions shouldn't negotiate, you're awful.

If you're okay with unions doing negotiation, why shouldn't a lone employee be able to negotiate a little bit? Why is a group of employees protesting not treated like an impromptu union?

"You're small compared to the company, so you should have exactly zero influence, instead of influence proportional to your contributions" is something a petty tyrant says.

Unions have exactly zero with choosing to do the work you want to do while getting paid for someone else.

It's also pretty silly to say "Well if companies A, B, and C are hiring individually, the workers can all choose to work for A and B but not C. But if they all contract out to company X, then company X workers need to shut up and either work for all three or none. They can't even ask for things to change, they can only quit."

Again, you want to pick your own job, work for yourself or find the right employer.

Picking what you work on is not a reasonable expectation of any employee.

If nobody is doing C, start your own firm and get rich doing something no one is doing. Or perhaps you'll find out why no one is doing C. But forcing your employer to make bad business decisions under the guise of "working conditions" is a bridge too far.

Doing it your way can actually cause much worse business decisions. If employees don't give any verbal feedback, only quitting, then the employer might take a hot-button contract and suddenly have multiple important workers quit all at once, losing far more money to replace them than the contract was worth.

And Gitlab isn't some unconcerned third party passing judgment on morality for the rest of us. We're not talking about your local Dairy Queen franchise gratuitously taking a position on Brexit for no reason. The only power Gitlab has is to withhold their own service. If you're going to argue that their service is so important for society to function that withholding that service constitutes being an "arbiter of morality for society," to the extent that's even true it only increases their responsibility to make sure its products aren't used for evil. A Dairy Queen franchisee doesn't have much power so they don't have much responsibility, but a Google or an IBM has enormous power to make a difference and therefore they have enormous responsibility.

I fundamentally don't agree that corporations should be given carte blanche to use any legal options to maximize profit with no regard to the consequences. The political process and legislation/regulation is probably a better way to address companies behaving unethically, but given that in many cases our political process has failed to put those laws in place we need to hold corporations accountable ourselves.

Doesn't this rule therefore forbid employees from discussing and acting collectively over this, which in the US is a federally guaranteed right?

If Google is doing business with nazis then as a consumer I have absolutely every right to boycott Google.

Generally where things go into lawsuit territory is when a business refuses to provide service to someone based on something that has protected status.

What if it's legal where's it's happening? Let's say that China use Gitlab to host their repo for their software that track US citizens. Would you be happy with that?

> The tech unicorns screwed themselves over BIG TIME, the second they stopped claiming they were just infrastructure and platforms and got into content moderation.

That's absurd, it was always true for ANY industry. You can decide not to support a company by not buying there because you don't support their moral standards. That's perfectly fine. Would you still be with an ISP that is against net neutrality while there is another one that is for net neutrality? Now replace "net neutrality" with any other moral decision and it's still valid.

That's what make company decide to takes moral stands. It's purely economics.

> They will now forever be a pawn of whoever has some power and has some agenda.

That was always true and still is even with Gitlab decision. Even in this case, Gitlab decision makes them a pawn to whoever has the means to do business with them. They want to still be able to get the business of ICE, China, etc... and you.

So do you also feel that billionaires shouldn't have an outsized voice in society?

Here’s an example: should a group of unionizing employees be able to say “vote for candidate foo, because they support legislation that aligns with our unions goals?”

Courts have said yes, and I agree.

I’m not the only person like me, and they’re going to have a choice as to whether they want to do business with nazis or so business with people like me.

They don’t get to just wave their hands and make these sorts of decisions go disappear. They have to make a choice.

If you think people should be removed from society altogether, you should vote to make what they're doing illegal so they can all be thrown in jail. Short of that, I don't think it's fair to try to prevent them from participating in society. Jail is the way we prevent people from participating in society, stopping them from using their bank accounts seems like a half-measure.

If someone from $ORGANIZATION made it clear that people that work for them and don't like Nazi's aren't welcome to be clear they don't like Nazis, I'd certainly consider dropping $ORGANIZATION.

> you should vote to make what they're doing illegal so they can all be thrown in jail.

What? There's a broad spectrum of things I personally don't like, or even think are odius that I'm not seeking to make illegal. The law is not a reflection of morality. I'm not seeking to impose my own value judgements on others (excepting murder, etc...), but the illegality of something has no substantial bearing on what I view as right.

What do you think the laws are for, out of curiosity? I assume you don't think they're supposed to reflect morality?

This is shifting the goalposts and not an answer to my question. Allowing Nazis does not imply disallowing anti-Nazis. You can allow both.

Laws are for lots of things, but they are for imposing morality, yes. I mean, I'm a consequentialist, so morality and "good outcomes" are synonymous for me. The law is to create incentives that make people cooperate in prisoners' dilemma type situations, at the societal level.

You personally avoiding Nazis is one thing - you are entitled to it and it has nothing to do with the law. However, if you are taking part in activism to exclude them from society, not just your part of society but payment systems, social media, things where them taking part has no effect on you, then I don't know why you don't go the whole way and make their views illegal. Also, being excluded from society in the ways that people think Nazis should be is a consequence so harsh that I would want it to have legal oversight. As the past has shown, "I don't like people x" plus mob rule is not a good way to decide people's fates.

Avoid them in your personal life, sure, but it sounds like you're talking about activism to exclude them from places where you could just not interact with them.

Just don't contribute to Nazi gitlab projects. If you're boycotting gitlab to try and get them to exclude Nazis, then I think you are using the private sector to enforce what you think should be a general rule, and I think companies and mobs are the wrong tool for the job. Take it to the voting booth, that is what democracy is for.

They even call out efficiency as a value. That’s not the same as “we want to make money.” An artist may value art more than relationships so they are a jerk to helpers.

This doesn’t mean the artist lacks values or that the artist wants to make money. It just shows specific values.

Yes, as pointed out above, the value is demonstrated to be "we want to make money, and it doesn't matter who gets hurt". Casiotone didn't say they don't have any values at all.

isn't that true for all voice in the soicety though.

The size of every group's voice in society isn't a magical balance. I don't want rich people or corporations to have an outsized voice either. It's a zero sum game, so the only way to reduce that is to give more voice to other groups. Employees should try to leverage their numbers more, not less, because that's the only tool they have. Gitlab is based in San Francisco, so their votes probably don't matter either.

The kind of policy that GitLab is proposing here is fine - or even aspirational, under a certain lens - until one day you wake up and find that the same software is being used to destroy your community and compatriots.

How could that happen? Isn't this free speech to max utility? Isn't that flawless?

No, it's free utility to anyone - and you might eventually find that the people who are using it don't have you and your neighbours interests at heart.

The design of technology is _not_ ideologically neutral. It contains embedded biases and beliefs - even if they were subconscious or part of a community mindset - and those can and will be changed and overruled over time.

Careless licensing of technology will lead to the overriding and subversion of those ideologies, in ways that many of us would find abhorrent.

If you'd like to support that on the basis of free speech, you should ask yourself whether the worst re-applications of these technologies would still allow you to speak freely.

I mean if your qualifying rule is everyone in the world, you've given Github the job of being world police. A role that won't make an earth shattering impact because bad actors can make those same programs offline. Why not have it in the light where we can see it coming? Being world police is the gov's job. Github should be treated as an american service and be required to respect only the gov's the US cares about and let the rest of the world use it on an "as is" basis.

My point - and I didn't make this clearly - is about the relationship between the company (GitLab) and the customers it chooses to do business with (think: aggressive undemocratic countries and the companies within them that enable oppression).

If you live in one of those countries and find that you are being stepped on by tools enabled and built by a U.S. company, then you're going to question the ethics and intentions of that company.

Until now GitLab has fostered a very positive open source ecosystem, making their own core product available for modification under the MIT license. That's fine, and that seems a principled and ethical stand.

It's still possible that their code will be deployed and used for malign purposes; those are the cases where as a victim you'd contact your (local) law enforcement if there's anything clearly illegal.

What seems a lot more questionable here is who GitLab chooses to peer with to profit from, and to allow influence over the direction of the product and the code itself. That is the change which is signaled in this policy shift - it is that GitLab will do business with anyone, and that employees shouldn't discuss that - indeed they are being told to treat it as some kind of virtue.

I am wondering on what you base this line of thinking? Do you have any examples where persons advocating for liberty are acting primarily out of self interest?

- GitLab is claiming to do business with any customer, on the basis of free trade and contribution

- GitLab is encouraging a culture where employees do not discuss or talk about those relationships

- I believe that technology is not neutral and the behaviours we as software engineers define in code, which then may affect thousands or even millions, are a result of customer influence (product decisions, feature requests, pull/merge requests, etc)

The commit[0] I read describes this as inclusion and 'efficiency' (i.e. 'yours not to question why'), but the real outcome I foresee is: "we are going to do business with shady companies and/or countries, and we want to encourage a company culture where this is seen as fine and dissent is discouraged"

This is self-interest on the part of GitLab the corporation - and ironically it also reduces liberty and freedom for GitLab employees to speak openly.

Meanwhile I can understand the top-level comment's description of why this might in some sense be a good business strategy. There's not a whole lot of discussion around the negative externalities of being successful in a way that compromises values though.

[0] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/b5a35716...

As a definitely not libertarian I think we should be placing much greater restrictions on companies ability to discriminate against their employees and customers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

Im not sure I understand the comment?

> If you can see how people might respond to IBM, infamous for providing technology that helped the Nazis in World War II [...]

Next, the bystander effect. Is it commendable a company watches as bad actors use its platform up until a court ruling puts an end to it/ Another area where Europe has history and Americans would do well to learn.

Europe's Google is Google. Everyone there uses it, so why would you need your own?