Let's just let tech monopolies determine what information we can or cannot communicate. Definitely nothing wrong will come of it. In fact, it's "the responsible thing to do"!
Also, stating that NYP "publishes some of the lowest quality journalism" is an insane hyperbole with no basis in reality. It may not be a top newspaper, but it's also far from being the worst paper in the US.
This story, specifically, had more verifiable sources than plenty of recently published stories which cite only "anonymous" sources and are therefore completely unverifiable.
The NY Post can still publish their materials on Gab or Parler. Their intended audience is probably there already.
> It may not be a top newspaper, but it's also far from being the worst paper in the US.
It's a Murdoch rag, with the usual Murdoch standard for quality and ethics. Lower than that it shouldn't be called a news outlet.
The vast majority of people are on these monopolistic platforms. Yes, dissenters can still publish on some obscure platforms that nobody is consuming.
If you ban a story on Twitter and Facebook, you are effectively ensuring the vast majority of readers will never get a chance to see it.
> It's a Murdoch rag, with the usual Murdoch standard for quality and ethics.
So convenient that you can know everything about The Post without apparently reading it at all.
Also, seems we no longer need to bother looking at facts or evidence. If a news story is vaguely associated with someone we dislike, we can just declare it wrongthink and dismiss it completely without further discussion.
In fact, you strongly advocate that it should be blocked from being published at all. If a piece of information is associated with a group or person we dislike for any reason, we should consign it to the memory hole. We shouldn't let people make up their own mind, we should make it for them.
This is essentially the problem. FAANG are the gateways to the web and having your content removed from them makes it considerably harder to have a web presence.
I'm sure most sane people would not want tech companies to be the arbiters of truth, though the solution as to how people can consume information without the inherent bias of platforms/algorithms/company policy remains to be seen.
That's not true. NYP:s audience is much bigger than Gab or Parler.
What people on these threads never seen to think about is, how long until Chrome starts blocking "misinformation"? Would you be making the same arguments then because, someone could theoretically download a separate web browser that nobody has ever heard of?
The problem with these arguments is there's no obvious end to them. They are very much a slippery slope. It ends with people who want to criticise the Democrats having to build their own internet out of their own cables and radios, which would be a de-facto China-style totalitarian society.
The problem is the sort of people who now work for these tech firms are fundamentally untrustworthy, and appear to have kicked out or 'converted' the people who used to work there who were. We are now left with a big pile of infrastructures and institutions that are controlled by political extremists.
Unfortunately this means that if Biden does win his critics will claim his win wasn't legitimate/fair, just like Trump's critics claimed about Russia. Except "Trump won because of Russia" was investigated deeply and there was nothing there, whereas tech company censorship is plain as day and visible for all to see.
how is that worse than letting Rupert Murdoch control every newspaper, whose media conglomerate makes Twitter look tiny in comparison. As much as Dorsey an all the other techbros annoy me at least he's not an outright right-wing cartoon villain
So is Verizon. Do you want to live in a world where your phone gets turned off if they don't like the conversation?
If it made business sense for them to do this, they would.
Call in a few threats to local businesses or SWAT someone and see how long it takes for your phone to get disabled.
What we're dealing with here is not ordinary abuse control of the sort that isn't controversial, and it's a false equivalence to connect the two. It's outright suppression of doing anything that might harm the political left.
Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat, Tiktok.
Collectively they form an extreme oligopoly position, something quite comparable to the telecom oligopoly. They should be held to a different standard accordingly, if they want to retain such power in our society. If only a few of them simultaneously collude to censor, it has what can only be considered something akin to direct government censorship in the impact it has: you are without voice while everyone else is holding a bullhorn.
In this day and age, being denied access to social media is probably even more socially & culturally punishing than having your phone number turned off. It's more akin to not allowing people to leave their homes and enter public spaces, not allowing them to ever protest, not allowing them to ever voice their opinions in a public square.
While I agree with you, something in your comment made me think. "What does not kill you makes you stronger". Maybe the test of our times is that we as a society learn how to ignore the trash ourselves, or if we do not learn the lesson, we perish. Do we want to learn to ignore, or learn to police?
Would you consider Twitter refusing to propagate this nonsense "learning a lesson"? I would.
And what causes it??
What if censorship itself causes hate speech?
What if windmills cause cancer? What if toenails cause climate change? Why do birds?
And the Streisand effect as stories like this get more press from the censorship news itself.
And the motivation I feel to beat this drum ever harder as people respond with downvotes and snark.
Hate speech existed before Twitter and will likely persist after it. Other social networks that allegedly do not practice content moderation also have identifiable hate speech content in them.
It's actually the uneven enforcement of their own terms of service that is primarily of issue and further whether their actions constitute an illegal campaign contribution to the Democrats by way of their intentionally tilted censorship.
If the DOJ were doing its job, they would be crushing Twitter right now with lawsuits over how Twitter selectively applies their terms of service to different groups when they feel like it. The Feds could make it extremely expensive to behave the way Twitter is. There are several other federal agencies that should be pursuing Twitter as well, that likely have legal ground to do so over these matters.
It's quite simple for Twitter: stop the intentionally selective application of your terms of service. Stop letting one side get away with constantly violating the terms of service with no consequences, while only aggressively punishing the political side you dislike.
The sheer volume of right wing propaganda that escapes their moderators would indicate the exact opposite. They suppressed this one so it wouldn't be glaringly obvious they ignore right wing abuses.
Twitter is a private company. They constantly, if unevenly, exercise their right to ban hate speech and what causes it.
> But it is a newspaper. A newspaper with a better reputation for reporting the news than Twitter.
Twitter is not a newspaper. Or a news organization. It's a social network.
> But people on HN try to falsely characterize it as the equivalent of the National Enquirer.
That's debatable. You admit it's a rag, that publishes some of the lowest quality journalism. It's also very politically biased, in a way that damages the very fabric of society. Restricting its reach is the responsible thing to do in their case.
As for the National Enquirer, nobody takes them seriously or call it a legitimate newspaper. That's why it's important to hold the NY Post to a higher standard.