Correct. Because of private property laws, not free speech. The problem isn't (exactly) whether companies have a right to do this. The problem is that increasingly they are our primary method of communication, and want to be, and with lockdowns, have to be.
If private companies are the only way we communicate, we may still have a free speech problem. Just as if everyone only communicated using yoghurt pots and strings, and a private company owned the strings and decided whose should be cut.
1) Business as usual (i.e. private entities make their own rules on their own property).
2) We classify these as public spaces. We then run into problems of "all" or "of a certain size." Both of which will have weird effects. "All" makes it difficult for competitors or niche groups (do we allow all articles on HN?). Of a certain size means companies have to transition and creates a new major speed bump in companies going through that transition.
3) We create a government owned platform. Now we'd be legally required to have free speech protected as this is clearly public property and free speech applies to government controlled platforms. But this has the downside of potential for abuse and turnkey tyranny. This becomes a bigger problem because these platforms tend to be multi-national. So does each nation run their own? Do we connect them? Does the UN run it?
4) We radically restructure the internet to be privacy forward. No one can dip their fingers in the pudding and taste it. No governments, no private entities. Do we do this centralized? Federated? Mixture? Do we do domain fronting? Do we force large private entities to facilitate such techniques so that we have a cultural fight? (i.e. encourage secure communications in oppressed countries) Or do we leave everyone alone?
There's a lot of other options too, but I see these as at least covering a few major points. The conversation is really difficult and we need to think about how to solve it and what the problems are instead of just shouting about it being a problem. I think everyone agrees that it is a problem, so let's move the conversation forward. Especially on a form for people that are able to solve many of the technological challenges to some of the above options. But society needs to decide the societal parts of the solutions and that requires discussion.
It seems to me that the online monopolies, natural or otherwise, should have to give way to something akin to common carrier status given their outsized importance on public discourse.
This isn't exactly new. Back in the days of the telegraph, those were abused and tapped and eventually the phone company became a common carrier.
They own the sites, not the people or their discourse. The people are in complete control of which websites they visit and it costs them nothing to use another website, which of course literally everyone does.
They sure believe they own the people and they do own the discourse, sometimes almost literally so in giving themselves unlimited IP rights to it. And this is part of the problem--that they censor communications between willing participants.
We wouldn't stand for this with the phone companies and we shouldn't for any other oligarch-controlled monopoly entities.
The larger a share of the world audience a platform owns, the less it should be able to censor.
Otherwise, one of these days, someone you don't approve of will get power over these companies and then it will be too late to regret it.
I don't like the proverbial nazis on the front lawn, but when your 'front lawn' is the entire country, and it's less literal nazis and more 'people who get accused of being witches', it's harder to support.
With great power should come great responsibility. I don't think we should hand over control of everyone's speech to a cartel of billionaires.
This is obviously false. These companies might reserve limited rights to reshare or redisplay your content at their discretion, but it is 100% wrong to say they have "unlimited IP rights" to anything posted by users.
> We wouldn't stand for this with the phone companies and we shouldn't for any other oligarch-controlled monopoly entities.
Websites are not phone companies. The reason why phone companies are different is because they control finite physical resources which are fundamentally essential to the logistics of communication. If the 3 most popular phone companies collude to exclude you from the network, communication becomes nearly impossible. This is not true of websites which sit at a higher level of abstraction, if the 3 most popular websites banned you there would still be many millions of alternative websites and communication platforms available to you or you could create your own venue or platform which is just as capable (if not nearly as popular) as any of the alternatives.
> The larger a share of the world audience a platform owns, the less it should be able to censor.
Why? Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular website lose their 1st amendment rights? Should the same rules apply to arbitrarily popular books, movies, tv, or radio? What is it about a website that makes you believe the creative control of a popular website's content and behavior should be abdicated to the government?
> I don't like the proverbial nazis on the front lawn, but when your 'front lawn' is the entire country, and it's less literal nazis and more 'people who get accused of being witches', it's harder to support.
I don't care about "nazis on the front lawn", I simply reject the idea that someone other than the owner of a website should be dictating what appears on a website, especially based on an arbitrary metric like popularity.
> I don't think we should hand over control of everyone's speech to a cartel of billionaires.
This characterization is just wrong. If you don't want your speech controlled by a cartel of billionaires then stop posting your speech to websites literally controlled by billionaires. It's very easy and very cheap to do and many people have been doing it for many years.
The Nazi website Daily Stormer was deplatformed by their domain registrar, their payments platform, and basically everyone else. The reality is that even though there are millions of websites out there, if one of them starts to become popular and becomes a locus of bad content, if the ~20 or so companies that control the Internet clamp down on them and there's very little they can do about it.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-neo-...
> Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular website lose their 1st amendment rights?
Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular restaurant lose their right to exclude Negroes? Law defines the boundaries of property rights. You can't start a tire fire in your backyard and expect your neighbors to just say "it's his property, nothing we can do."
PayPal terminated thier account because they run a digital currency and could not satisfy PayPal's KYC inquiries. This is nothing new.
> The Nazi website Daily Stormer was deplatformed by their domain registrar, their payments platform, and basically everyone else
So what? How do you think things should be different? I am personally ok with companies coordinating to shut out Nazis, tens of millions of people died to deafeat them and it seems perfectly reasonable to me to say "you know what, I don't want to do businesses with nazis". I understand the fear of a slippery-slope, but keep in mind that the slippery slope argument is generally regarded as a fallacy, and I see no evidence to suggest that this is actually a widespread problem, with the example of the dailystormer and like two others constantly reused to emphasize your point. If there is enough demand for Nazi website hosting, someone will fill the market need, same as with porn and other things some people don't like.
> Why should the owners of an arbitrarily popular restaurant lose their right to exclude Negroes?
What are you talking about? Racial discrimination is illegal in the U.S regardless of how popular your restaurant is. Also, refusing to serve food to black people isn't the same thing as refusing to display nazi ideas on your website.
I think the answer is in decentralized networks, because they are controlled neither by governments nor by companies.
I really don't agree with people comparing ubiquitous global telecom monopolies like Facebook to small businesses and private citizens who want people to stay off their lawns and not have the government regulate their IRC server that they run out of their basement.
If you don't just own a lawn, but you own every lawn in the town and every single space where people could congregate, then no I don't think you should have absolute control over who can use it. Coal corporations and sharecroppers tried doing that a century ago with "company towns".
If you own more than a certain amount of property, you have responsibilities as well as rights. You can't just build your own little nation within a nation, because you can afford the land. And you certainly can't use your money and influence to bully and evict people because you disagree with them. Many churches have done that in the past.
You can't circumvent our laws by just privatizing everything.
Internet platforms over a certain size need to be required to reflect American values.
> I really don't agree with people comparing ubiquitous global telecom monopolies like Facebook to small businesses and private citizens ...
You can compare two things without them being exactly the same in every way. Two things being different doesn't mean they shouldn't be compared. The point the GP was making is that in this context, the difference between Facebook and HN (or any other small site) is one of scale, not kind. They acknowledge that there may be a need for regulation anyway when they write:
> But we as users think about them as public spaces because they facilitate similar things to public spaces in the offline world.
Which I think is clearly indicating that Facebook's property should not necessarily be treated the same as someone's lawn.
macho man Randy Savage
The jurisprudence, largely from "conservative" judges, is that "speech" is any expression, and it applies to corporations. Ironically, that's what'll make it tough to regulate Facebook/Twitter/etc. They didn't see the 2nd order affects coming.
Here's the 1st amendment:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
What works for me is to replace the words Congress & government with Facebook, Twitter, or any company with a certain market share. If you want to be a corporation that facilitates communication between thousands of people, you're subject to the rule, ie, you lose some of your private property rights. If you have fewer than say 1000 users, do what you want: only private property rules apply.
This used to be true but is no longer true, I'm afraid. Government and Public Entities are now colluding in suppression and censorship. There are no checks and balances, this is a government taking a stance, promoting a narrative, and companies attempting to garner social standing or the opposite, which is to garner social standing by non-involvement. Sometimes these companies are looking out for their own legal responsibilities and associations in the given government too.
My generation thought it was a good idea for companies to take moral stances on stuff. In a way we asked companies to regulate morality because the government could or would not. Deplatforming became a word propagated by activists for use against their perceived enemies at the time, which were largely the "intellectual dark web". Those tactics took shape, were refined, and are now being used by social media companies, the government, and law enforcement in what appears to be almost cooperation agreements to suppress and censor in the name of fighting misinformation "for the public good".
The juicy note here is that the same infrastructure that fights misinformation "for the public good" is nearly the same infrastructure that autocratic rulers and governments install to control narratives, beliefs, and the spread of ideas. Americans, much less the world, should be watching on now. What is the public good, who decides it, and what are the repercussions for being wrong? The last part I think is the most important, we cannot let the people who propagated these ideas and cemented them as a solution walk away unscathed in history.
Then don't use Zuckerberg or Pichai's website. Your website works on the exact same internet as theirs.
Maybe if you host it on a server which is physically in your house, but most ordinary people don't really have the chops for that, or the resources. Comcast tends to frown upon it. And when they use Instagram because they didn't like Facebook, that's still Zuckerberg.
> Nobody is owed a spot on google's search index and there is a finite number of spots on the first page of a given search query.
They can have editorial control or they can have a monopoly, but not both. But agreed that trying to regulate search results is a fool's game. Dissolving the monopoly is almost certainly the better way to fix this class of problem, across the board.
This isn't a good analogy for several reasons. To start with, restaurants exist in physical space, so losing access to a popular restaurant chain makes it more difficult to eat since you might have to travel farther to find food. This isn't an issue for a website since the cost to "travel" to any http website is always the same regardless of the site.
The next problem is that you're comparing food to use of a website. It might be problematic if all the fast food in your town is owned by a handful of companies that coordinate to exclude you, since we all recognize that food is a basic human need, having your post banned from a website however is a meaningless triviality in comparison.
Finally, it is not convincing to suggest that being banned by 6 very popular fast food restaurants is a serious harm society should seek to prevent, just eat somewhere else, there are many alternative options and many new ones appearing daily, just like with various internet websites.
Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for violence on the platform? You seem yo be making this grand slippery slope argument, that by banning this person “WHO NEXT”. It’s a nonsensical position. I don’t care who’s next because it’s fucking YouTube and all you have to do to exert your “free speech” is write a book, stage a protest, whatever.
When YouTube shut this down, they did not silence this person. They didn’t prevent you from finding this information. Arguing that all speech is being silenced is genuinely idiotic in my view and speaks to a larger persecution complex.
YouTube is not the government. If you want it to be, integrate it as a utility or something. But no, I don’t need Nazis or terrorists on YouTube. I’m not afraid of a chilling effect. And I’m genuinely thrilled they’ve been removed from a platform I frequent. Because they suck.
On the other hand, I want to see the Tiannemen Square massacre. It is valuable information. Crucial information and information that I want disseminated, preserved, and a part of the platforms I frequent.
Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for violence over the telephone? Not rhetorical; we need to allow someone to advocate for violence over the telephone so we neither have to monitor all phone calls nor come up with and administrate a corporate definition of violence.
> On the other hand, I want to see the Tiannemen Square massacre.
A patriotic Chinese person asks: Why do we need to allow someone to advocate for terrorism on the platform?
Denying the Holocaust = bad
Tiannemen square protests = good
Making these decisions is not impossible and saying we just can’t decide does not track with me as a valid argument.
People can tell the difference between Tiannemen and terrorism when you give them the info to do so. You don’t need to show someone nazis and Holocaust denial so they know it exists.
I understand the position you take, so don’t be so condescending about “well what would a Chinese person think”. You’re entirely missing my point.
Or, you know, unless they happen to ban you for absolutely no reason.
There are hundreds of tough questions, even if you don’t find any of those difficult to adjudicate (whether they can be discussed and examined).
I fall pretty strongly on the “the government shall let everyone discuss everything” side (yes, including Nazi rhetoric and being a racist sphincter), because it’s too easy for me to imagine the danger of leaving the government in the business of judging which thoughts and speech are categorically “acceptable for society”.
Society can do that better than the government can, IMO.
Does that clear it up?
We can stop here, nothing is gonna come out of further finger pointing.
They’re not comparable because the western companies are not doing this due to the threat of retaliation from their own government.
There’s more nuance here (which I address in that blog post). I wrote that so I wouldn’t have to rewrite the same stuff every time this issue comes up.
The reason I said it’s not comparable to companies operating in western democratic countries is because otherwise the first reply every time I write something like this is a false equivalence about how the “<insert western country here> is the same if not worse...” which is just not true.
Iranians are banned from using some western apps by threat of the American government.
A better example is when the FBI seizes webhosts whose users are associated with illegal activity.
Edit: Decided to use better judgement and remove the reference to parent’s employer, which is against guidelines. Sorry dang.
Being skeptical of motivated reasoning is fine, but dismissing the content of arguments entirely because of (a likely wrong) impression of where they work is not.
You replied to a post about companies trying to appease the CCP trying to imply that it's a problem with chinese companies trying to appease the CCP
You've just been told western companies are also trying to appease the CCP.
How is that not comparable? Somehow not being China-based gives you a pass to play the appeasement game?
Sorry for having to state the obvious, but I never told them that, and I strongly suspect canceling a speaking engagement of a Palestinian terrorist (designated by the U.S.) after Jewish protests in the U.S. neither appeases nor angers China.
> Ironically enough, YouTube and Facebook also censored the exact same event that sparked this later event.
Reads like the Zoom event (later event) mentioned is the same topic as previously censored
-
But that's fine since Faceboom and Google very commonly _do_ go out of their way to appease the CCP, it'd be silly to imply otherwise when we've got
- senators writing to Google about their censorship on behalf of the CCP (https://www.hawley.senate.gov/senator-hawley-demands-google-...)
- Google's Chinese ventures trickling down technology to their military (https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3663852)
- Project Dragonfly...
- Facebook formerly attempting to re-enter the Chinese market with additional censorship (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-china-idUSKBN13I...)
Facebook tried and failed to appease the CCP for many years: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2019/10/17/mark-zucke...
At the end of the day these companies are behemoths well beyond the point of having things like morals. They'll work with whoever they believe will work with them.
I think it's wrong when western companies appease the CCP too. The Tiananmen Square example is better than the messier one in the article because it's a clear case of a government leveraging its power to cover up its own abuse.
The distinction I was trying to make is about the company being based in a non-democratic country. In the west companies are choosing to appease the CCP for their own self-interest and access to the Chinese market (which is wrong), but companies operating out of China are forced to comply if they want to exist at all.
It's not possible for Chinese companies to exist and make the right choice, so they're going to make the wrong choice (and we'd be better off avoiding them entirely).
The distinction is between the governments and how they operate which makes the pressure on the companies different. It's not to excuse western companies from making similarly bad concessions.
In the end dragonfly was abandoned by Google.
Zoom can never choose to ignore the CCP's censorship requests and remain a company while continuing to operate with the majority of its devs in China.
Zoom knows this and doesn't care.
This line made me grin. Ironically enough, YouTube and Facebook also censored the exact same event that sparked this later event. (Actually the role of YouTube in this episode makes the parent comment doubly funny, considering "banned at Google" is listed as evidence that Zoom is evil™.) I found out when trying to learn who exactly Leila Khaled is from Wikipedia. There was apparently even an "End Jew Hatred on Zoom" protest in front of Zoom headquarters demanding Zoom to cancel the event, pictured in [3]. Of course now Zoom’s getting all the flak because any bad PR for them can be pinned on you know who, and fed to an existing narrative.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_Khaled
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20200927005246/https://www.insid...
[3] https://www.jweekly.com/2020/09/22/after-protest-zoom-will-n...
[4] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/zoom-criticised-cancellin...
[5] https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/24/21453935/zoom-facebook-yo...