I know folks like to get all conspiratorial over social networks "acting in tandem", but it really shouldn't be all that surprising.
Individuals have vastly different tolerances for all sorts of things, but if you lump them into groups of tens of thousands, the average tolerance for things will be quite similar.
When the latest alt-right provocateur hits the threshold of bad PR for Facebook, he's likely right at the threshold for the other major social networks. No need for a shadowy cabal.
Thiel: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosiegray/peter-thiel-d...
Kaplan: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/05/facebook-joel-kaplan-kavanau...
Yeah, if what you are doing is obnoxious and a lot of people hate it, you are going to get rejected from the vast majority of spaces.
Cloudflare isn't as ideologically pure as you might think. To this date, they have only refused service to Daily Stormer and 8chan for political reasons. Real neonazi sites like stormfront dot org (unlike 8chan that had many apolitical communities like for games or anime) continue to enjoy their protection because it hasn't negatively affected their stock (the news on DS and 8ch broke before the IPO, but their launch might have been a failure due to bad press).
Sure, but that's like "if the utility companies are cutting of your water and electricity, just make your own! nobody is stopping you from hooking an exercise bike to a dynamo and buy bottled water at the store". Technically true, practically not really a thing.
You can say just about anything you want, but that doesn't mean other folks are required to listen to you or expend their resources to amplify your speech.
And that's a good thing. Because if you can force others to publish/host/amplify your speech, others can force you to do the same with theirs.
In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the owner declined to perform a creative service, that being decorating a cake for a gay wedding.
You might think that is also wrong, and that’s fine, but it’s a very important distinction. Legally compelling someone to perform a service that violates their religious beliefs is tricky to balance against non-discrimination. You have to consider the precedent that doing so would set. The supreme court recognized this in a 7-2 decision, so it’s clearly not a trivial or ridiculous objection. It only is to you because you don’t share the religious belief. But we must balance everyone’s rights, and that isn’t always easy.
On the morals of it; I think that if twitter thinks that banning all conservatives will make them more revenue they can and should be allowed to do it. My value statement would hold equally if you :s/conservatives/liberals/g.
Conservative lawmakers have become very found of the Obama quote, "Elections have consequences." Well, the culture war has consequences too. And conservatives have completely gotten their asses kicked in the culture war in the last 30 years. Due to anachronisms in our means of determining representation this has not translated into a loss of legislative power. But if they want to hold sway outside of Washington they will have to make an effort to win back the hearts and minds of the public and more importantly the American consumer.
They will go to the supreme court to fight for [a sole proprietor's] right not to sell cupcakes to gay people but then turn around and demand to control what [giant corporation] does with their servers.
This is a nonsense hypothetical.
Without limited liability, Twitter would not exist in its current form or size.
Correct.
I also mistakenly thought the cake baker was a sole proprietor. They are incorporated. I should have done a simple search before posting my original comment.
That said, I now mostly agree with the comment I was originally replying to.
> What does limited liability have to do with a corporation being owned by one person?
Correct, nothing. To clarify:
My position is that an entity enjoying limited liability (which in the US includes an LLC or corporation owned by a single person) has exchanged "rights" for indemnity and therefore can be compelled to - for example - bake a cake or not censor content hosted on their servers, but that a sole proprietor can do whatever they want re: refusing service or moderating content.
In monopoly situations (or duopoly, if you wish), there are generally different rules that apply, because you can't just go somewhere else to do business: there is nothing else. Hence utility companies can't simply go "I don't like your nose, no water for you".
I think creating new platforms has actually gotten easier since twitter's inception. Back in the day it was almost magical to have a website that performed at scale. Now you just hand a credit card to your favored cloud provider.
In your metaphor I see the internet as the utility not the platform provider. If akamai or level 3 decide that they wouldn't carry your traffic, then you might have a case that you're being censored.
If Apple can keep Epic out of the app store then @Jack can ban whomever he damn well feels like.
Other companies/platforms are free to advertise or offer services to entice users to switch. As conservatives like to remind us money is speech. You are not entitled to someone else's attention but you can try to buy it.
If they were banning Russiagate conspiracies, while letting conservative stuff run rampant, would you be giving me the pitch about how private property is more important than free expression?
Maybe there's a higher principle here than partisan warfare?
In this particular case, where there's a common carrier for information, we figured out the market failures and how to handle them long ago, the answer is neutrality to the message. There are some people in the thread making the case that it's different now, and maybe it is, maybe we need a different approach, but "just trust the market" is the dumbest idea ever.
The market is paper-clip-optimizing gray goo. Harness it, but don't anthropomorphize it and certainly don't "trust" it.
Don't impute principles to the market.
Those companies wouldn't touch gay rights with a 10 foot pole until one day all of a sudden they're beating their way to the front of the line at the pride parade.
Republicans have only won the popular vote for president once since 1990. Trump isn't even attempting to win the popular vote this year. The median income in 2018 was 10k higher in blue states than red states. And you wonder why advertisers (and thus twitter) value blue tribe users more?
Conservatives can't gerrymander the market. They are going to need to find a way to compete for relevance with the majority of the public not just their base.
They'll follow what's popular, and if that's liquidating jews, they'll do it (some of them did!).
In conclusion, I will say there is a way out of this morass for conservatives. They have to kick the neo-nazis, the proud boys, and qanon out of the party. They have to accept science and that the scientific method is the best way to determine objective reality. If they continue to call anything that falls outside of their accepted narratives "fake news", they will continue to lose the culture war. And thus, be more and more sidelined from the national discourse. Due the undemocratic elements of our constitution they conservatives may retain political power, but in the end, the consent of the governed is more important.
Don't trade principles for that, it's not worth it, the news cycle will be different tomorrow anyways. Certainly don't trust the corporations over individuals or the press for a one news-cycle 'win'. What kind of liberal values are those? "George W Bush liberals"?
(I'm a Bernie voter, not a conservative, btw).
"In your darkest hour, when the demons come, call on me brother, and we will fight them together!"
When they can influence billions and shape elections, it's time to seriously review their power. This is how we treat ISPs and phone providers today, and social networks of a certain size should be considered in the same class.
Undersea cables, phone lines, and the radio spectrum are critical communications media. Private web sites with selective publication criteria by way of their content moderation policies are not.
I'm imagining someone who messes up badly enough to get banned from all those places and still somehow blames the stores rather than their own actions.
That’s exactly what antisemites say of Jewish expulsions.
Should private companies have any regulation at all? Should oil companies avoid pollution? Should ISPs ensure quality of service? Should medical companies ensure safety? Why is it that trillion-dollar companies that are larger and more powerful than anything else before should not be regulated when it comes to something as crucial as our freedom to communicate?
I find it ironic that another major HN story today is another instance of Google wiping out someone's account without any recourse, erasing their online presence and decades of data. Is that the new normal? Megacorporations ruling our lives without reason or appeal?
The world has changed. Social media is no longer just a website. It's communication fabric with network effects larger than entire nations that surrounds our lives. We either deal with it accordingly or risk losing much more.
The underlying physical infrastructure, sure, the underlying standards like the TCP/IP stack, DNS, Ethernet, etc, well those are too, but these are categorically not quite same as what you are arguing should also be included in that group.
More people communicate over social media than phone lines today. Why is the former not equivalent to the later? Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey said that he believes social media is a human right - do you disagree with him?
Obviously Twitter is not because it has been down for about an hour now and life is going on just fine.
The critical question is if they ought to be allowed to wield that power unchecked, up to and including when that reach has progressed far enough to have real impacts on our political system, and so impacts on people's lives.
Remember, we're talking about what we'd like the law to be, not what the law is. These definitions are up for debate and redefinition.
News organizations have wielded this power for at least a century. Their decisions on what stories to publish obviously have political implications, and in some cases their editorial boards even explicitly endorse one candidate.
Facebook and Twitter are private entities, just like The NY Times or Fox News.
This is not a strawman, I simply see no other way to interpret this comment.
They don't create content as an organization and only facilitate communication, which is exactly why section 230 is being contested.
The First Amendment applies to everyone in the U.S.
Facebook and Twitter are just 2 of the biggest with many others like TikTok, Whatsapp, WeChat. It's the size and scope that should be used as a measure of when they cross over into public utility vs private project.
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/28/arts/a-boycott-of-tv-adve...
You're dealing in fantasies from an obsolete era.
I can actually get behind no regulation for private companies, twitter can censor who they like as I can drive my favorite tank registered as my company vehicle and don't bother with taxes anymore.
Yeah, but it seems like FB and Twitter have been reviewing their power over the last four years.
They looked at the power of trolling-network, botnets etc to the influence elections. They basically triggered a circuit-breaker when a heavy hit-piece hit their networks.
Which is to say "the power of social networks" isn't just the power of the owners of the networks but also the power of groups embedded in the networks. Should these providers be fair brockers for all kind of manipulated viral content as well as for individual positions? Should they use their position of the ultimate kill switch to be the ultimate authority? I don't know but I don't think you put the most recent events as Facebook versus Organic Content - it's more Facebook versus Rupert Murdoch.
Amen. And my feeling is that we would be better off without them. This is why i'm in favor of slow computing, slower network speeds, and slower lifestyles. (I should state that this is not sarcasm)
Modern 4k monitors are awesome. Need a fast computer to drive them.
My phone shoots 20 megapixels photos. I only post them on social media once in a year or so, but have cloud backups and I need bandwidth for that. I watch movies sometimes, Blu-ray ain’t available at local physical retail, again need internet bandwidth and local storage.
Imagine I make a website where I censor everything except pro Trump memes. Is that a bastion of free speech, compared to a website where I allow, y'know, actual free speech and discourse?
I can't stand when people try to conflate the first amendment with freedom of speech. Nobody is (seriously) arguing that websites shouldn't have the legal freedom under our government to limit speech to whatever they desire. What we're arguing is that these platforms ought to value free speech as a principle and act impartially. Of course they have, and should have, the freedom to censor whatever they want for whatever reasons they want. But they should have the integrity not to.
And they make editorial decisions constantly about what content each person sees. The fact that these decisions are scaled by computer algorithms does not mean they are not happening.
This idea that they are neutral and free communications channels is a marketing message that they invented and pushed, because they thought it would help them succeed in business. We don’t have to believe them.
They’re just private companies, two among millions. If they make unpopular decisions about how to operate, they will fail. They should be allowed to do that.
Conversely, if they make popular decisions that you disagree with, it doesn’t mean the whole concept of free speech is damaged. Again: just two companies.
But you're ignoring the fact that the corporations' value system consists of maximizing profit.
Anything that isn't pushing in that direction is both a distraction and a hindrance to the stated goals of the corporation -- making money.
Valuing free speech or having integrity are laudable ideals. I do my best to prioritize both. Sometimes I fail. But I do the best I can.
But my (or your) goals as an individual aren't relevant in this context.
Changing the incentives for these corporations to do whatever it takes to maximize profit would be a good thing.
That will entail the willingness of a majority of us to vote with our feet/wallet, likely aided with smart regulation.
But until we change those incentives/priorities, the status quo is what we'll get.
If they make bad decisions, then people can go to competitors; it's as easy as typing in a different URL. That's how the Internet--and open societies in general--are supposed to work.
What it looks like to me--someone who has been on the Internet since before the turn of the century--is that a more recent generation of people grew up with these very popular websites as part of their lives, and they came to believe that these very popular websites are somehow inherent to the Internet and to society in general.
They're not. The Internet is more available to entrepreneurs, startups, and new ideas today than it was when Twitter and Facebook were started. They're not too big to fail.