You would be hard pressed to find liberal / progressive content being censored online.

No, I wouldn't.

https://fair.org/home/that-facebook-will-turn-to-censoring-t...

I might have to work harder to find high-traffic social-media accounts peddling stories about the left being censored online than finding the same thing about the right.

But, if so, would that really be evidence that the right was being censored more, or just that its complaints are being amplified more by the very same platforms they claim to be selectively censoring them?

I think this is a false dichotomy. Whenever speech calls for violence that upsets the current social-political order in the US, it is censored regardless of being "left" or "right;" one example being the very-left chapo trap house crowd on reddit. My understanding that there is less violent content coming from voices identified as "progressives" that tend to value other more acceptable* methods for social change.

* Acceptable meaning something different per platform, but if we are being honest seems to usually mean "can sell mainstream ads space alongside them"

Clearly that's the wheelhouse of the right-leaning national groups, right? Oh, maybe not. Or maybe it's the rightwing nationalist governments cracking down on disadvantaged groups?

Really just seems like anyone that can get away with it is censoring people with differing opinions.

Seems like something that will surely end well /s

Hypocrisy on display

What I actually said is "anyone who can get away with it"

And obviously they would be doing it for partisan reasons.

A "liberal" on Facebook calling for the beheading of a conservative politican would be banned (possibly even arrested) immediately. The opposite can and does happen every day, with no penalty.

And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2020/10/two-new-studies-show-again...

You're right, they technically don't. But they ban everything that can be even remotely interpreted as "offensive". To give you one example, I got banned for pointing out the appeal to nature fallacy. I've said that rape and murder is technically natural and yet it's not socially acceptable. Literally just that. Nothing less, nothing more. But someone either misinterpreted that simple sentence or found it offensive because of the context of the conversation, and thus I got banned.

But either way, defund the police is not mainstream anywhere - that’s pretty universally understood to be a fringe (and ridiculous) proposition, and has already proven its devastating consequences.

Again, goes to show the polarization of the US.

[1] Obviously, black lives do matter and fascism is bad, but as slogans "Black Lives Matter" and "Anti-Fascism" represent very radical political programs. You should be as suspicious of these slogans as I assume you are of slogans like "All Lives Matter" and "Anti-Communism".

Everyone has a personal Overton Window - the set of ideas that they think are reasonable and acceptable, even if they personally don't agree. When most of the personal Overton Windows approximately align on a particular topic, then we have society's Overton Window.

For example, think about gay marriage. 50 years ago, maybe even 20, 95% of society thought that gay marriage was clearly not acceptable. That meant that 95% of society agreed with 95% of society's personal Overton Windows on the topic, and so we had a clear society-wide Overton Window.

Now we have maybe 30% of people who still think that gay marriage is clearly not acceptable. We also have 40% who think that gay marriage is clearly in bounds. Of those, maybe half (so 20% of the population) think any doubts about gay marriage are clearly unacceptable. There is no position which a large majority of society finds acceptable. (All numbers made up, but I think they're in the approximate neighborhood.)

The society-wide Overton Window didn't move. It shattered.

"Socially acceptable" is, necessarily, relative to some defined group.

Especially in a political system with limited major parties and partisan primary elections (especially if they are closed, but even if they are open in theory but tend to attract a specific mostly-stable community in practice), and a substantial population that participates in neither parties primaries, considering the Overton Window within each party and/or ideological identity group as well as the "national" Overton Window can be useful. The GP comment could be rephrased without, I think, change of meaning as "the Overton Window of the community of the ideological Right and/or the Republican Party has moved relative to the rest of society such that it excludes much of the window as viewed by those not ideologically tied strongly to the Left or Right faction".

I see no evidence that that is the case.

And the question you have to ask is how do you see it when it happens to right-leaning people? Is it happening in your immediate neighborhood? Or is this supposed social "cancelling" happening to people who have pre-existing or readily-made-available access to strong, highly-visible, wealthy network that shares their story as outrage fuel and/or enables the socially "cancelled" a highly-visible platform to do so?

Information gathered as unstructured anecdotes, especially absent analysis of the systematic biases in how the information gets to you, is not a reliable basis for drawing conclusions about relative frequency, especially when the topic is specifically differential suppression of viewpoints and information.

And I suppose that's probably a good thing.

> And all this still isn't relevant because we are talking about government censorship.

Agreed that the article is about government censorship, and I commented before I read the article.

However, given that the US government at least has shown very little backbone in its threats to regulate social media companies, their tendency toward more censorship also seems concerning.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...

https://www.newsweek.com/bannon-calls-fauci-beheading-154528...

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/05/steve-bannon-makes-beheading...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/steve-bannon-s-twitter-acc...

https://nypost.com/2020/11/06/twitter-bans-steve-bannon-for-...

This kind of political speech has no place in a democratic society. The fact that it comes down to social media and Internet providers to regulate it, however, is reflective of a policy failure. Keeping calls for extremist violence out of the public sphere ought to be the responsibility of the criminal legal system, not private business.

You must be joking? Twitter, Google, FB, the blatantly partisan censorship?

Conservatives and libertarians LOVE to bleat about property rights, but they can't handle it when private parties won't provide free advertising for right-wing conspiracies.

Enforcement of contracts is essential to a healthy society, but is it good to enforce a contract where one party either lied or coerced the other to sign? No, or at least not necessarily.

The nature of the contract between social media platforms and their users (both explicit and implicit) has changed dramatically since the days that Twitter was "the free speech wing of the free speech party". Users have sacrificed a increasing amount of privacy for less and less obvious benefit. In the meantime, many people have come to depend upon these services for connecting with others, for their livelihoods, and for news independent of corporate media.

Have the social media companies deceived their users? Or have they forced unconscionable terms upon their users? Have they violated consumer protection laws?

I am not a lawyer. I don't know the answers to those questions. But I do know that there are some lawyers and judges who do think that some of these social media companies have overstepped. We don't necessarily need a civil rights case, or a constitutional amendment, or even to repeal Section 230. All I think is necessary is for existing contract and consumer protection laws be litigated and enforced.

This kind of action would benefit both left and right, and I think is more constructive than opportunistically deciding that "businesses can do whatever they want" when you think it only hurts people on the right.

Be honest that you really want to use the force of government laws to mandate that Twitter spreads your version of free speech across the platform paid for and developed by Twitter.

Perhaps you should try reading my words instead and responding to them rather than the imaginary things you pretend I actually think? It might work out better.

Ergo, what you really want is government to enforce your version of free speech through "existing" contract law.

While I do believe in the necessity of freedom of speech (not just the first amendment, but a particular set of cultural values) those abstract values aren't my primary concern here. My concerns (across the various tech platforms out there) are:

* the disruption to peoples' businesses that result from the opaque and largely incontestable content moderation process. This is mainly a concern where the content in question does not violate either the law nor the TOS.

* The exploitation of consumers through the gradual degradation of privacy.

* The attempts to undermine consumer rights by removing users' options for legal remedy in the TOS

Basically, if users' are providing value to these platforms through advertising revenue, mine-able private information, transaction fees, etc. what expectations can the users' have with regard to the value they receive and how they are treated by the platforms? I do not think the answer of "nothing" is acceptable.

I disagree. Sure there will always be some amount of misinformation on the internet, but a fully state-controlled media and internet (see - China) is far, far more effective at spreading propaganda and controlling the narrative.

There is also the immunity to bad ideas aspect; Its important that the propaganda is heard openly and argued against in public, as this makes people immune to these arguments. Censor these bad ideas and we make the next generation vulnerable to them.

I don't think we can offset this with education, as with drugs, we never give the kids the very best bad idea - argument when we try to teach the dangers of drugs, this is why so many are vulnerable to the dealers quiet persuasion. I really feel like the more we silence movements like the alt right, the more vulnerable our society becomes to their bad ideas.

This is repeated so much it is practically a meme at this point, but is there anything to actually back it up? Especially when users have the ability to control what they see. If someone is in a bubble of disinformation, it doesn't matter how many voices outside the bubble try to debunk those claims.

It seems like a more effective approach would to be to work on preventative measures so people are never exposed to these harmful beliefs rather than wait until these beliefs are heard and then try to convince them they are wrong.

The censorship of the good information is the problem. And it probably started with censorship of bad information that lead to the bubble in the first place.

>work on preventative measures so people are never exposed

This is where the analogy breaks down, its not a virus, its an idea, anyone can come up with an idea, good or bad. you want to protect people from themselves, you must immunize them from the bad ideas they could come up with. We know it works, it was the only vehicle from the dark ages to the enlightenment.

We also have the problem that if you set up a perfect system of blocking bad ideas, the people who run it can have bad ideas of their own. Hell the mechanism we have to even tell the difference between bad ideas and good ideas in society (open free discourse) will have been destroyed.

There are plenty of examples of people trying to do this around the world, tyrants and hell-holes created with the best of intentions.

There is nothing nefarious about bubbles. They happen automatically when people are in control of what they consume. Imagine I join Twitter and I am given a list of people to follow. I don't like to hear from people with viewpoints that I think are crazy so I unfollow someone if they say something I disagree with. If some gets retweeted into my feed saying something I agree with, I might follow them regardless of the validity of their comment since I don't have the time or motivation to fact check everything. Wouldn't you know it, I am now in a bubble despite there being zero censorship of anything. If one of the people in my bubble repeats some false claim, am I going to see someone dispute that claim or will the disputing occur outside my bubble?

>This is where the analogy breaks down, its not a virus, its an idea, anyone can come up with an idea, good or bad. you can't protect people from themselves, you can only immunize them, we know it works, it was the only vehicle from the dark ages to the enlightenment.

Ideas do have virality to them. Something like QAnon is a prime example. Is isn't like "wealthy democrats drink the blood of children" is some random idea that multiple people reached through parallel thinking. It was a particular conspiracy theory that spread from one person to another. Stopping that message from spreading to more people seems like a more effective approach than trying to retroactively unconvince people who have already bought into the conspiracy.

I agree with the rest of your comment about the dangers of censorship. That is why I said I would have a preference for something that is closer to free and open than not, but that doesn't mean we can't recognize the specific situations in which completely free and open systems can go wrong.

It's foolish to think that censoring these people actually solves anything. Because you never addressed the broken psychology that attracts them to this garbage in the first place, they'll continue finding other outlets, your attempts to censor them only feeding their delusions further. Censorship might help you avoid them on the internet, but let's see if you can avoid them at the polls.

[1] In Search Of A Flat Earth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44

Its still censorship, but i see what you are getting at.

> Stopping that message from spreading to more people seems like a more effective approach

Your example would be stopped whether true or false, as it would likely be the wealthy in charge of whats deemed true.

How? The bubble is purely a result of my own choices in what I see. Is CNN being censored if I don't tune in to watch every night?

>Your example would be stopped whether true or false, as it would likely be the wealthy in charge of whats deemed true.

I'm not sure if you are familiar with QAnon, but I was referencing an actual real world conspiracy that hasn't been stopped.

This is so false it's bordering on the absurd. Anyone with even a little experience with debate and techniques like Gish gallop, which are widely employed, know that rational arguments simply do not convince most people of things. Humans aren't purely rational beings. It's dangerous to assume we can just talk away propaganda because all evidence points to the contrary.

More than 80% of Trump supporters believe the election was rigged against their candidate despite there literally being no evidence supporting this claim. We're seeing propaganda succeed on such a massive scale because it's so widely spread and so difficult to counter. You've got literally millions of people who have been conditioned to label everything that contradicts their views as "fake news". There is a reason why Fox News viewers score lower on current information than people who don't watch any news at all. Their propaganda works and talking about it and pointing it out isn't helping at all.

It doesn't matter whether you can change someones mind on the spot, it matters that your argument is superior and the public tend to repeat and re-argue the superior argument. And yes, things like election fraud, that might be possible, and has happened before, is harder to argued against than a flat earth. But these positions are also the ones where we might be wrong.

Eventually regressive nations LOSE economically, politically, and in warfare. They are not convinced through debate.

This is not accurate. Many non-Trump supporters also do not trust the results. I suspect you have not paid a lot of attention to the legitimate concerns.

> We're seeing propaganda succeed on such a massive scale because it's so widely spread and so difficult to counter.

This is true, but as of late, it’s going the opposite direction. It’s not that anything that contradicts their views is fake news, it’s the stuff that contradicts reality. See finepeoplehoax.org for a great example.

Freedom of ANY kind allows bad things to happen. The most secure world is one in which we are all locked up, nobody ever interacts, and are only fed via tube from their government provided feeder in their government provided cube.

Since I'm fairly sure that isn't what you're advocating, please, explain what you're hoping to accomplish by stating that a free and open internet is a problem.

Also I don't know if this was intentional, but just letting you know that your phrasing of this post comes off as needlessly confrontational. You can ask for clarification without asking "what are you hoping that argument will accomplish" which sounds accusatory as it implies a nefarious motive.

It is very likely that moving forward, many right wing people will shift away platforms like facebook, twitter, and reddit. In fact, these platforms already exist. Gab is a replacement for facebook and parler is a replacement for twitter.

Lets not pretend that liberalism doesn't come with a jackboot on the neck of the people either.

No, he didn't.

USA PATRIOT Act was from Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI). It incorporated material from 3 earlier bills, one of which was also by Rep. Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the others by Sen. Daschle (D-SD) and Rep. Oxley (R-OH).

https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/3162...

I should have said draft instead of original.

Autoritarianism often goes hand in hand with nationalism, but not always. In recent history, it is the non-nationalists who seem to be most pro-censorship, does it not?

Unfortunately, due to the extremely dynamic and high velocity nature of current times, this article wasn't able to get into the new flavor of micro-censorship - hopefully they address that in the future.