This is a weird complaint. One site bans Alex Jones (after a major news event covered internationally). Media gets wind (likely due to him complaining very loudly about it) and starts asking the other major social networks why they aren't following suit.
No conspiracy required, for the same reasons multiple independent news sites writing about Fitbit today doesn't require collusion.
However I'd still like to be able to view flagged messages -- maybe click to view?
More generally I'd like to be able to hear the unpopular opinions, and see them discussed constructively. Rather than them being flagged and voted off
Though I agree -- remaining constructive is essential
There are some things such as porn that is censored in many areas.
Twitter has even begun censoring political speech from public figures: "Twitter will now hide — but not remove — harmful tweets from public figures" (https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/27/18761132/twitter-donald-t...)
The eighteenth-century ideal of free speech in a public forum has now become de-facto mediated by private companies acting in their own interest. Some may believe in free speech more rigorously than others (say Reddit, as compared to Facebook). The fact that the government cannot censor speech matters less and less nowadays, given how much speech now passes through private companies' control.
This statement is misleading. Some public internet forums owned by large corporations are mediated by companies acting in their own interest. Nobody is required to use those forums and many alternative forums exist, other individuals or firms are also able to create their own online public forums subject to whatever speech standards they consider ideal.
> The fact that the government cannot censor speech matters less and less nowadays, given how much speech now passes through private companies' controls
This is not true. The fact that government cannot censor speech is as critically important today as it ever was. It doesn't matter that a lot of speech passes through private companies because that is a free choice made by individuals who voluntarily push their speech through those companies and are free to take their speech elsewhere if they desire. Additionally, censorship or moderation is sometimes a desirable feature of a social media product because unbridled free-speech is sometimes abused in a way that is antithetical to the user experience and thus to business prerogatives.
But sure, there are practical angles in the US where, for example, if we could shift the popular focus to Free software, We could regain society's Freedom of Speech. Perhaps you're focused on the technicalities because you're trying to work towards that - but talk constructively rather than dismissively. It helps nobody to push a stubborn idea that there is some strict distinction between USG and the S&P 500. Whether the political bureaucracy controls corporations or corporations control bureaucracy, it's all government.
They're not public squares though, they're privately owned webservers, they don't become nationalized just because they're popular. That's like saying the dive-bar in your local town is the de-facto town-square because everyone meets there after work. Those individuals made the free choice to interact in a privately owned establishment thus they are subject to the rules of that establishment, if they don't like the rules they are free to go to another establishment with more favorable rules.
> A clique of companies is now in the position of censoring the vast majority of interpersonal speech, period.
100% false. They are within their rights to refuse to rebroadcast content you upload to the servers they own, but they cannot prevent you from rebroadcasting your content anywhere else.
> We could regain society's Freedom of Speech
Freedom of speech existed before Facebook and Twitter, so your suggestion that their business practices have caused free speech to go away is incorrect.
> So perhaps you're focused on the technicality because you want to work towards that - and please do! But state it constructively rather than dismissively. It helps nobody to perpetuate a stubborn idea that there is some kind of strict distinction between USG and the S&P 500
This is pretty hilarious. You're suggesting I self-censor the "technical" truth in favor of your editorialized version of the truth because "it helps nobody to perpetuate a stubborn idea that there is some kind of strict distinction between USG and the S&P 500"... even though there is a very obvious "strict distinction" between the government using the threat of force to censor speech vs a private company operating a platform they own and pay for.
> Whether the political bureaucracy controls corporations or corporations control bureaucracy, it's all government.
So are you saying you want to ban corporate lobbying or that we should nationalize large influential corporations so that we can ensure they function in service of the people instead of share holders?
The combination of your low effort dismissal and attacks on my intellectual honesty makes me think this conversation is not worth the effort. Have a nice day.
There is a huge distinction. Facebook doesn't have a military to enforce their policies. They might be the defacto town square but it's only convenience and network effects which make that true. If there was enough dissatisfaction with the way they are running things then they could be gone tomorrow. That's not comparable to kind of censorship that, for example, the CCP imposes.
You're merely restating this assumed division in terms of a specific. Facebook has much less business need to deploy the military than say Exxon or United Fruit, but they still have the ability.
> only convenience and network effects which make that true.
Sure, but how does that make it any less real? The ability to move between states does not invalidate gripes about your current state government. Witness the volume of user complaints. If leaving were a continually-visited fictionless choice, they would have simply left.
> That's not comparable to [the] kind of censorship
They are of different magnitudes, but they're certainly comparable. I'd much rather be subject to Facebook's censorship regime that CCPs. But they're both censorship regimes - if we don't want the former to grow closer to the latter, then it behooves us to compare them.
And when independent candidates run for office and can't get their message out for being shadow banned, and the corporatist candidates are always the number one trending subject, you'll be there to finger wag for not bothering to set up their own world-class content distribution system first.
The study and control of group behavior is real. The network of educated and privileged elite is real. The power of the media run by these elite perhaps surpasses that of the justice department. The media can start wars.
"Twitter has even begun censoring political speech from public figures"
vs
"The FBI will require Twitter to censor political speech from public figures"
I think those two scenarios are eons apart.
Shoe's now on the other foot.
America et al also don’t like certain things being published on social media and try stop it from existing on those platforms too.
Even child porn isn't an easy subject. Everyone can agree that liking 12 year olds sexually is pedophilia and images about that are child porn. But when we are taking about 16 year olds it's muddier since we are taking about child porn outside of pedophilia.
And that's just (north western) Europe who are culturally very similar to the US.
It's not muddier. The issue isn't the nature of the people viewing the content, but the ability of the victim to consent to the creation of the content. There's no muddiness involved here - sexual exploitation of minors for the production of media is not ok.
For 12 year olds it's much easier with the "we don't support pedophilia" argument (which has wide support)
I'd rather see nudity censored than criticism of religion, to be honest, so thank the Lord it's not Europe using soft censorship.
In the latter case, is child pornography probably indicative of a crime? Absolutely. But banning the images and their dissemination is clearly an infringement of free speech. In the former, banning hate speech is also clearly an infringement of free speech. If someone's actions result in violence or death then punish them after, and divorced from the issue of speech; do not place prior restraint on speech.
They were surprised you could do that...
There is even an old soviet joke about this.
An American tells a Russian that the United States is so free he can stand in front of the White House and yell, “To hell with Ronald Reagan.” The Russian replies, “That’s nothing. I can stand in front of the Kremlin and yell, ‘To hell with Ronald Reagan,’ too.”
Also, we are allowed to post photos with breasts (and much more) on our social network Vkontakte.
Now try to acquire a popular social media app in USA.
Their censorship algorithm must be broken.
No, you're subject to corporate censorship policies. Let's not pretend that individual platforms regulating content is the same as government censorship. Please show me how their policies are related to "the American governments stance on human sexuality".
Also, doesn't Canada have a few laws on the books regarding how people are allowed to address other people, specifically, LGBTQ people?
They're taking a fully US-centric approach, treating abortion as a political topic - see https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted... . You can't advocate for abortion in Canadian ads. Which is insane, considering abortion is fully legal here. Going down that list, it's "things that are controversial in America". It's absurd to apply the same policy globally.
Not really. Canada prohibits hate speech and discrimination against LGBTQ people. The whole "using the wrong pronouns is now a criminal offense" meme was made up by someone looking for something to be offended about/sell books about how PC culture is ruining everything.[1]
People can be sued for discriminating on the basis of gender identity or expression. Repeatedly using the wrong pronoun can be used as evidence of that, but probably has to fit into a larger pattern of behavior. And that's the kind of thing you could credibly sue an employer or business for in the US as well.
1. https://factcheck.afp.com/no-canadians-cannot-be-jailed-or-f...
Which in a large part with preference tailored to US
It's a distinction without a difference. They don't have any redress, or ability to influence either US corporations, or the US government, much like how Americans have no ability to influence the CPC.
The theoretical point is true enough, that American content restrictions would generally wind up being exported abroad. The key difference is, however, that we do not actually have Chinese-style content restrictions.
There's a pretty good meme about differences between European and American media take on censorship [0].
It's now locked behind an Imgur login due to being NSFW (over a single nipple), but the basic premise is that US media would censor a nipple away, leaving the person recognizable, while European media didn't take issue with the nipple, but instead censored her face to protect her identity.
Which is a pretty good example of how different cultures prioritize things differently. Scale that up to the reality of the tech space being dominated by US companies, and suddenly US cultural norms largely became established as global norms [1].
Before the Internet, US soldiers stationed in other countries had a very similar effect: They also brought their culture with them, which often was considered way more exotic than anything local. Decades later nobody even much cares or notices how US influenced much of our culture has become in Western Europe.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2f8xmd/nsfw_the_dif...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-29/the-cleaners-...
But these things do not exist in a vacuum.
Ask anybody working on the tech and legal ends of the adult industry and you will hear quite horrific stories about having to jump through so many hoops just for finding a payment provider.
For a while, these used to be www dominating issues, and how they were dealt with in the US, often ended up being the de-facto global standard.
A very recent and relevant example for this is footage out of the Syrian Civil War on platforms like Twitter and YouTube.
Over these past years, whole swats of videos have disappeared on the basis of being tagged as "terrorist propaganda" [0]
In a very similar vein how "Napalm Girl" ended up getting censored as child pornography [1].
By now even Reddit has learned to "selectively forget", as all undeleting/uncensoring sites that used to work, have stopped working.
Just because it's not some US government agency playing the censor, but rather the US government pressuring US companies into self-censorship, doesn't make this kind of censorship any less real in its overall impact.
[0] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/youtube-ai-deletes-war-cr...
From [0]: "YouTube is facing criticism after a new artificial intelligence program monitoring "extremist" content began flagging and removing masses of videos and blocking channels that document war crimes in the Middle East."
From [1]: "Facebook said it has to restrict nudity for cultural reasons."
I'm not saying this isn't important. I'm not even ruling out some sort of indirect and informal government role. (Government policy and culture are intertwined!) But they fall far far short of supporting the false equivalency drawn in this thread ans elsewhere between western companies removing content due to TOS violations, etc. on the one hand, and content being removed literally, and undisputedly (as far as I've seen) in response to direct commands by the Chinese government.
EDIT: Sources in-text since i'm already being downvoted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Enabling_Sex_Traffickers_...
All American social media censors their users, most people just arent producing that type of content.
Social media platforms censor more than that. Try posting a picture of a nipple on Facebook.
Facebook removed LGBT pages because the American government forced them? Do you have a link?
Google and Facebook not being in China is not necessarily a bad thing. Both the companies are massively popular in India but make no profits off Indians yet. On other than their popularity has made Indians value these companies a lot as employers and every third Google/Facebook engineer in Mountain View is an Indian person. Google or Facebooks adventures in India (and China) if at all are nothing but a huge subsidy being delivered to these upcoming markets at the expense of American consumers.
Say China opens up its markets for Google and Facebook like tomorrow would you be fine with that ? Both Google and Facebook are then going to borrow money from american to build massive data center networks in China spending billions of dollars which may or may not be recovered in near future.
Xenophobia and divergence from free market principles in USA have made other countries better potential successors to Silicon Valley. In near future we will see more and more companies coming up from China. What USA has done with Tiktok is essentially a child like tantrum to scare other investors and chinese companies but very likely US government will end up with an egg on its face.
He makes the point that US consumers become subject to Chinese censorship policies when using the platform while China outright bans or heavily restricts American companies from operating (eg google search, Facebook).