To illustrate: absolutely free speech would imply the right to harmfully agitate kids for whatever your cause is. Does it seem obvious that this is a bad idea? Then just extrapolate "kids are easy to manipulate" to "adults are mostly just older kids".
And btw, I know what it's like to be on the other side. That doesn't justify turning a blind eye to the madness that comes with absolute free speech.
Either you accept that a line has to be drawn somewhere, or you accept every consequence of absolute free speech. Which, imo, would be a terrible idea with 7 billion people just waiting to be gamed through their fears.
Don't get me wrong, I don't consider what we're seeing here unproblematic at all. I just don't consider absolute free speech to be unproblematic either, quite the opposite.
Remember those cases were Facebook was promoted to use violence and persecutions against religious minorities across the globe? And then after the investigations, Facebook just brushed it off as "oh, that, sorry we didn't know"?
Reddit was full on anti china rage exactly a year ago, so much so, that the moderators of the covid subgroups themselves started moderating it in a way that allowed for some objectivity one of the covid groups.
I guess the difference here is that Facebook, Twitter and Reddit who have been prospering with this poison are now at a point where they can no longer play the ignorance card, which is why they banned a certain individual.
The main contrast is that Parler's rhetoric is that they'll take all the discards from the other platforms.
If someone promotes a campaign to hunt down an individual and murder him/her; certainly I wouldn't blame anyone for taking that content down. I think we already have a good tool for where the line goes and that is the law. E.g. you can't recruit and plan for terrorism and you can't spread child pornography among other horrible things.
This is something else. This is a situation where three major companies use vague paragraphs in their terms and conditions to target a specific platform.
What's next? If Parler self-hosts, will demands come to ISPs to shut them down? Where does it end.
They existed, it's just that it takes a lot of courage to speak out against deplatforming ISIS, so most people just stay silent in public. I was fairly outspoken about defending their right to expression, but that was only to "safe" groups of friends rather than the general public. (Of course, now that ISIS is basically dead I can be a bit more free with my words and admit to disliking them being censored)
Regarding your kids agitating example, as a society we already do plenty of brainwashing of kids, it's why our ideas of right and wrong are so different from 200 years back.
Also, we had near absolute free speech on most of the internet for most of the 2000s, so your fearmongering there rings hollow.
Your reply is not addressing the main point: that P believes there ought to be limits to free speech (imo also a completely obvious conclusion). P provides simple "Ad absurdum" examples for why that is. In you stating that kids are "brainwashed" elsewhere too is just engaging in whataboutism.
Can you explain why you think there is sufficient additional value in completely---absurdly so---free speech (as per P's scenarios, for example) over limiting obviously dangerous and detrimental speech? Obviously the crux lies in drawing the required boundary, which is the job of an educated society as a whole and might be in flux with the times.
Not simply, no.
It's a very long (book sized) argument that I've been gradually making bits and pieces of over the years. I really wish I'd kept the little bits I'd type out in one forum or another so I could just point at that...
Though, for a fragment and possible intuition pump: the censoring is putting the cart before the horse. You need to determine whether something is dangerous or detrimental before banning it, but the act of censoring it or neighbouring ideas or the kind of people who espouse it prevents that very determination that ensures you aren't censoring true things. You also get all sorts of other effects like purity spirals and fights over which group gets to decide what is censored and groups then doing things even they admit is wrong in order to keep control of the censors ("it's worth a little lie to stop the nazis taking control").
EDIT: You're correct that the comment about kids isn't a full argument, it's an argument fragment that needs various other things to be held and explained in order to be complete. But there's no point in spending ages outlining it all unless I'm going to do so in a less transient medium like a blog post. So instead I post the fragment hoping it's the one piece the reader was missing for things to click.
Would you please provide a link to ex-president Trump inciting violence like ISIS? Lesser forms of agitation for violence is fine too.
> Then there is the always present double standard. Why did Twitter allow “Hang Mike Pence” to trend last night? Where are the suspensions and permanent bans?
Actually, they intervened and stopped it.
https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-stops-hang-mike-pence-trend...
Also note:
> Journalist Yashar Ali tweeted a screenshot of the topic trending, indicating that the phrase had been tweeted over 14,000 times. Ali noted that most people were "quot[ing] some of the insurrectionists" at the Capitol, rather than making direct threats against Pence. He wrote that the phrase "shouldn't be allowed to trend."
See also despite the URL: https://nypost.com/2021/01/09/twitter-allows-hang-mike-pence...
> “We blocked the phrase and other variations of it from trending. We want trends to promote healthy discussions on Twitter,” a company spokesperson told The Post. “There are Rules for trends — if we identify accounts that violate these rules, we’ll take enforcement action.”
I think it's great these companies have stopped supporting Parler. The problem is that so much power has devolved to these entirely unaccountable organizations that it feels like an infringement of free speech.
We are going to need a stable place for important discourse and that will require carefully designed governance structures, transparency, and independence that no ad supported company can possibly provide.
Twitter is kinda great that I can post direct to the whole world. But that requires a bit of discipline. As an affect I somewhat think through what I'm posting. Much like what we all try to do here.
Everyone around here pines for the older internet. And one of the ways to get it back is to have standards, that are visible and enforced on larger platforms so people know, that speech has consequences.
And if people want to do their seditious terrorist thing. They can host it themselves and manage all the risk.
No public square has every been as big as some of these sites. So maybe the metaphor doesn't work.
We're in new territory here,and we need new institutions, new standards.
There is a roofed mall with like 40 stores where I live where three nurses were protesting shoppers crowding. The mall forced them to stand outside the mall.
I mean physical "public squares" are not what they used to be and it is a problem.
Instead of a war over slavery, this is a war over shared reality or personal echo chambers, and most of the tech companies have been fighting against shared reality.
Please choose wisely and soon. Unified reality or seperate ones.
People are planning to overthrow the government of the country you live in, "in your house".
I think this is a terrible way to run society - no company should have the scale or power of these companies, but it turns out that this is what can happen if you run things by a market. To argue that they shouldn't do this is basically arguing against a market economy!
I think a good analogy might be to call "acceptable speech" a form of "regulation". Traditionally, established large companies are fine with additional regulation because it makes it more costly for small competition to operate and compete with them. Likewise with expecting and making it "the norm" for platforms to police their content and get in to trouble for bad content, they make the operating cost of smaller competitors higher (if those competitors choose to play by the same rules).
Right now we're seeing that the smaller competitors are choosing not to play by the same rules, which I think is rightfully making the established companies nervous. From a company perspective it makes them worry about their market share. And also from a personal perspective, the individuals inside those companies worry that the alternatives will allow movements that they don't like to grow.
I'm just expressing why I find this disturbing; as you seem to too.
In the long run, the market will solve this problem by creating alternatives. It is just a matter of time.
I can still express why I think these companies are taking the wrong actions and believe that they have the right to take those decisions. And that there is sensible alternative to a market economy.
To me the situation feels a lot more like 4 friends sitting together...
friend1: hey, you still owe me money, pay me back!
friend2: huh yeah me as well!
friend3: me as well and planned to pay me back tomorrow. will you even have enough left? better dow it now!
Even with this just happening organically on the spur of the moment, triggered by his own behavior, it would be easy for friend4 to feel like there was an orchestrated setup...
I don’t think the answer to that should be “a few people at large companies that are, at best, kept at bay by rich people buying or selling the company’s shares” (their customers have too little choice to exert much pressure. I also don’t see protests at BigCo’s headquarters or angry mobs storming BigCo HQ to force them to change course (other ways to exert pressure), but maybe I’m not looking far enough into the future)
These large companies act as judge, jury and executioner, and don’t allow appeals.
That sounds like a consistent standard, and effective moderation, does it not?
Twitter was willing and able to shut down a credible, widespread incitement to violence. Parler was not.
While I think Apple and Google are within their rights to remove an entry point to an app that has incited violence over the past week, I'm not sure I feel the same about Amazon / aws (or GCP if it had been hosted on Google).
If you remove Facebook from the app store, we could all still access the web frontend, just not the app.
Banning a site from ec2, though, feels more like Cloudflare removing ddos protection.
I don't know what was on parler. I don't know how bad it was. My thesis, though (and I think stratechery/Ben Thompson would agree), is that Amazon should require a much higher bar before banning something from ec2 than either Apple or Google do.
Fwiw, I don't think this is "coordinated" so much as big companies responding simultaneously to potential (or already ignited) PR fires
I happened to look at that trend. Nobody that I saw were actually suggesting people do it - they were quoting (or referring to) what was being said by those at the Capitol, and then commenting on it.
I don’t see a double standard for those cases, although they did subsequently remove it the trend. Possibly because some people might have been calling for it in the “latest” tab - not a fun place looking at tweets outside the featured tab...
"It doesn't affect me or my life/views presently, so I don't see a reason to object to it." - The "I have nothing to hide" sort of thing.
What's happening is just morally wrong. Not because the situation may flip, but because there's a higher moral law to things and what's happening contradicts this law. Even if your side appears to be winning, it's actually losing, because it's losing its soul.
Free speech is just utopia.
I'm old enough to remember Kathy Griffin and Trump's severed head.
Or "If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire fucking thing down". https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/1307107507131875330
How is that not the same?
Regardless of whether there policy should or shouldn't be to remove violence, the bias in how they apply it is very clear.
EDIT: Feel free to downvote. Don't hold back.
We support people rising up against what we consider bad governments using these platforms, and get quite angry when they’re banned though.
(Not picking sides, just trying to understand the nuance)
Do I understand your equation correctly? On one side are people under oppressive governments. And they are not oppressed only because they do not have access to free speech. On the other we have people that use baseless claims to justify violence.
Obviously this is not what you had in mind. But It can be perceived in that way.
I guess there were discussions like this after beer hall putch.
What’s the criteria?
If it’s a successful election; then the annexation of Crimea is legal and should not come under fire by these platforms.
Additionally, the Ukrainian government should not be permitted. (They were organising via Twitter and Facebook)
I don’t like rules which are like “things I don’t agree with are not permitted but things I do agree with are”- like the people who refused to bake gay wedding cakes should not be unhappy with trump being deplatformed from Twitter. I dislike hypocrisy so I’m trying to figure a rule in my head for this.
I do agree Trump has a huge history of lying, and was continuing to lie with his claims about the election. However, I find the claim that Trump "incited" the riot to be unfounded and am shocked to see everyone use that word so casually. If and when this goes to court, I guarantee they will not be able to prove that Trump incited a violent riot simply because the evidence does not support it.
Remember, there were tens of thousands of attendees in DC in support of Trump, across several separate events. To my knowledge, all these events had applied for permits and were granted them, allowing the city and other agencies (like National Park Service) to plan their response and presence.
At the capitol, a few hundred people came onto the capitol grounds. Of those, an even smaller subset engaged in theft, vandalism, and other violence. But the vast majority of people that came to DC this last week for Trump did not engage in violence. So how can it be claimed that Trump incited violence? He made false claims about the election, and a small number of people took those claims and used it as justification for criminality. But to me that seems like the fault of those who participated and not really a justification for banning Trump.
But given the context of everything, did he incite violence? You’re saying I’m misinterpreting Trump. Given the situation he’s set up, is it a surprise at all that many others might have interpreted what he said in the same way?
If a BLM organizer says “lets go out there and protest peacefully” and then follows up with “but you know that Footlocker on Main and 34th? We definitely shouldn’t burn the place down. But you know, the owners of that place are awful people. We need to show strength. They are evil. But don’t burn it down. But really they’re evil”, I’d say that was inciting violence too.
All of this reads to me like very typical motivational bluster that accompanies situations like protests. BLM organizers also use phrasings like "we're going to take back our city" and "show them our power" and so on.
Yeah, that’s incitement.
Regarding the "trial by combat" line - an article on Giulani's speech (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...) describes it like this:
> While baselessly claiming that Democrats won elections because of fraud, Mr Giuliani bellowed to the crowd: “Who hides evidence? Criminals hide evidence, not honest people!”
> He continued: “Over the next ten days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we're wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we're right, a lot of them will go to jail.”
> Mr Giuliani then suddenly yelled: "Let's have trial by combat!" to lacklustre cheers from the crowd.
To me this does not sound like a call to violence. It sounds like a bad joke or poorly-worded bluster or an attempt at hyperbole. Giuliani was quick to condemn the riot at the capitol, for what it's worth (https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1347149858000556032).
He also does this with Tweets. Oh that retweet of that white supremecist, just a re-tweet. Doesn’t mean anything. Except there are good people on both sides.
But it does mean something when you are the President and you have a large number of followers.
People have been getting death threats for weeks about the stolen election. The only thing this President has done is continue to amp up the lies and demands of his followers to do something, anything.
The world isn’t a programming language, there’s no state machine and no precise instruction set. It is full of hints and innuendo.
Please interpret Donald Trump in context.
He asked the rioters to “remain peaceful”. As in, by all means, the thing you did to break into the building, that’s OK, but be peaceful. And by the way, the election was stolen from me and I love you.
It was only later, after sustained pressure that Trump told the rioters to leave.
This is like the police after being called to an in-progress home invasion telling the invaders to not break anything while in the house, and by the way we really like you.
Trump talked about marching to the Capitol building and “showing strength” at the rally. His employee, Giuliani, was making comments about hand to hand combat at the rally. Before the rally, he commented that it was going to be a wild day. During the riot, he praised the rioters by referring to them fondly as special people. I don’t think even this rundown does complete justice as to what Trump did.
In the context of a criminal trial, Trump could claim ignorance of what his actions meant. I think that would be a hard sell considering he’s a professional politician and the President of the United States. In the context of an impeachment trial, I don’t think claims of ignorance could hold. Even allowing it, that level of cluelessness and recklessness still qualifies as high crimes and misdemeanors.
Does he have to use rhetoric specifically calling for violence in order to justify the banning? At the rally beforehand he said "we can't let this happen", are you surprised at the outcome?
What the leader of the country says and how they say it matters. He doesn't need to specifically instruct them to overthrow the government... he's been fueling the fire for a long time now suggesting the election was rigged. While it's an obvious lie, because of who he is some people are going to believe him lie or not... remember the people who ingested fish tank cleaner?
We can all agree that "go and kill X" should be stopped, but it's not clear where the line goes. "X is a bad person" could be incitement too, depending on context.
In contrast to this, judges are generally able and trained to make such assessments by evaluating the circumstances and the intentions behind speech, and when they err there is a clearly regulated appeals process.
So I don't think it's a good idea for companies to be allowed to ban whole apps like Parler or persons like Trump, even though I principally endorse these measures. The wrong mechanisms are behind it. Instead there should be more oversight of corporations and how they make decisions that may massively affect someone's online life (which has become an almost essential part of life for most people). Mere accusations of crimes should not lead to a full-fledged ban.
I'm fine with limiting the number of people one can reach, e.g. Twitter disallowing retweets or Facebook sending posts only to closest friends. However, even these measures should be transparent, based on openly published and clear guidelines, and there must be an appeals process with several instances and humans in the loop.
Right now, the problem is that individuals and companies have no right of public online representation, and at the same time huge corporations have all the rights to cancel anyone's account without transparency or appeal. That is inherently unjust and will get worse the more important online features become for the rest of your life, e.g. what do employers think when you apply without Facebook account, and so on.
Thus is a brilliantly good question!
My big takeaway from reading Twitter’s blog behind Trump’s suspension is that the words of a tweet themselves are not particularly deterministic of policy violation or enforcement. What seems to be the clincher is the _interpretation_ and their _real world effect_. For example, Trump’s recent tweets taken collectively _and_ the effect of his supporters’ March on the capitol were starkly different than the “hang mike pence” or the women’s March (for example’s sake) that happened a few years ago on the capitol.
In both the latter cases, there is no credible threat of real world violence. Similarly, “Hang Mike Pence” tweets have no predictable certainty to cause any harm to Mike Pence or anyone in the political community the same way Trump’s tweets about skipping Biden’s inauguration (and therefore being a good target to attack by his supporters etc etc), OTHOH, are.
Twitter’s blog obviously has more context and better explanation.
What I’m trying to say is that, it seems like _interpretation_ of tweets & _determination of real world effects_ is what leads to policy enforcement. Of course, that is susceptible to human judgment and error. But I don’t think it rooted in coordinated outright bias against conservative voices.
A significant number of riots took place in 2020, and this is true even in DC. For example just take a look at the photos and videos in https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/31/fires-light-..., which shows damage on a far greater scale than this recent capitol riot. Lots of people and organizations on Twitter or Facebook had organized these events, which included looting, property damage, vandalism, assaults, arson, and more. Many politicians, such as AOC, condoned and even encouraged these events (see https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/13480304421596897...). This extends to news media as well, who often mislabeled violent riots as "peaceful protests" and excused them or covered them in a sympathetic way (see https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/07/media-downplays-blm-antic... or https://nypost.com/2021/01/08/rage-at-capitol-assault-makes-...). All these actors were inciting violence, certainly to the standard Twitter uses to judge them (https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...).
These other past events included much more significant economic damage in the billions and many more deaths than the capitol riot. So why are all those people and organizations allowed to continue using their social media accounts? Why weren't those same participants, organizes, enablers, and sympathizers criticized just as heavily by politicians, news media, social media, and others? This is a clear double standard, where criminality and violence is permitted if those who are in control of these platforms (news outlets, tech companies) agree with your cause and share your ideology.
The violence was also not just confined to May. In Seattle, there's a group called EDM (Every Day March) that conducts illegal riots blocking highways every single day (literally on over 200 days so far since George Floyd). They organize themselves on social media, particularly on Instagram where they have two accounts and document/evangelize their own crimes (https://www.instagram.com/morningmarchseattle and https://www.instagram.com/morningmarchseattle). Note that Facebook has not banned them, GoFundMe allows them to fundraise on their platform, and local politicians support their actions and false claims (example https://twitter.com/cmkshama/status/1288511663948230657).
Another example is Rose City Antifa in Portland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_City_Antifa), which is the oldest and most active antifa group in the US, and has been engaged in riots throughout 2020. They have done things like beat a journalist who was documenting their crimes (https://thepostmillennial.com/judge-dismisses-anti-slapp-mot...), set fires at a courthouse (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/us/portland-protests-dama...), vandalized federal buildings (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8670207/Portland-pr...), and repeatedly assaulted police officers. This disgusting terrorist group still has a presence on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/sometimesantisocialalwaysantifascis...) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/RoseCityAntifa) even though they are explicitly and consistently violent.
As an aside, isn't it interesting that people are still gaslighting everyone by claiming that antifa is "just an idea"? When's the last time an "idea" showed up to a court and filed a fraudulent anti-SLAPP motion after viciously beating a journalist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment
Same with the Second Amendment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
Free speech is not just any value. Sooner or later you will find yourself on the side of an issue where your speech will be attacked.
Then there is the always present double standard. Why did Twitter allow “Hang Mike Pence” to trend last night? Where are the suspensions and permanent bans?
Again, sooner or later we will all find ourselves on the other side of the double standard.