They might be the latter, but I wouldn't consider it obvious. Regarding social media, we've gotten to the point where even US Visa applications ask for social media handles (and I understand they consider it as a negative datum if you don't provide one). And we're also at the point where some companies won't provide you with respectable service unless you @ them on social media. Regarding payment platforms, generally people expect them to be quite neutral, since getting locked out of the financial system is not exactly going to lead to a great life in the modern digital economy.
I don't know at what point these cross into "utility" territory, and I'm willing to entertain the idea that they might never do so, but I find it quite debatable and very much not clear.
(Note: None of this is to opine on the reactions to this particular incident. Just commenting on the more general idea.)
I have never thought they were neutral when it came to actual crimes. That's so much liability, why would anyone expect them to take it on given how risk averse they are?
PayPal kept doing that so much that regulators (FTC? I forget) finally made them stop holding pseudo-cash accounts for people until/unless people specifically requested it. Laws take time to catch up.
> why not obvious billion dollar ones? why would anyone expect them to take it on given how risk averse they are?
Again: I'm not opining on what they should or shouldn't be doing. All I'm saying is, if you think the fact that it's not a utility is a good supporting argument for this, I'm saying their classification is far from obvious to me. But if you have other arguments to make, I'm not expressing any opinions on them; I'm solely replying to the "it's clearly not a utility" bit.
Yes. In general, a utility provider may refuse to initiate service if the requesting customer cannot comply with the requirements outlined in the utility’s tariffs or rules. Utility tariffs and rules are authorized by the CPUC.
https://consumers.cpuc.ca.gov/cab_faq/
Utilities must provide service to any member of the public living within the utility’s service area who has applied for service and is willing to pay for the service and comply with the utility’s rules and regulations. The utility’s duty to serve is not absolute, however. A utility may deny service for good cause (e.g., nonpayment).
https://www.nclc.org/images/pdf/older_consumers/consumer_fac...
If my water, power, or internet was cut off, I would immediately suffer real, life changing inconvenience and hardship.
To me, the difference between these things is incredibly stark.
Sex workers face this problem. Even in countries where sex work is legal, the payments industry refuses to deal with them (in part because the chargeback rates are high for these kinds of transactions). They're forced to deal in cash and have all sorts of problems because of it (not least the fact that depositing large amounts of cash triggers money laundering regulations, and doing that too much can cause a bank to close the account).
Parler being booted is society's reaction to a movement that has been getting more extreme for the last 5 years.
I'll note the irony that many of the people complaining about companies refusing to deal with Parler are the same people that support bakeries being able to deny the business of people in a protected class.
I think this is the issue though, right. Elections represent what society wants. If 5 corporations get to decide you’re toxic and that prevents you from campaigning, what regulation will help insure this authority isn’t abused or misused?
I think it’s also worth noting the irony that many of the people complaining that bakers should be forced to bake a cake are supporting stripe being able to refuse service.
It's only ironic if you choose to ignore the fact that one of those cases involves discrimination against a protected class and the other does not. If you don't ignore that fact then the irony is only applicable from those who were espousing the "free market, free speech" position in the previous case.
But even if it was a protected class at the time of the suite, I think the opinion was that religious rights (another protected class) come into play.
For me, this seems to expose that some people aren’t arguing from first principles but kind of change their position based on a pre-conceived notion.
So just like people now bringing up that looting isn’t so bad after the capital riot/insurrection were against rioting in situations over the summer.
It seems odd to me, or at least irrational, that someone could be against rioting for BLM purposes but for rioting for conspiracy theories. Or that someone could be against a baker’s ability to not serve a gay couple, but for a hosting company not serving an asshole megaphone company.
So just as people, rightly I think, were arguing that discrimination against sexual orientation should be a protected class and thus illegal; people now are arguing that net neutrality/free speech should have regulation, change in rights.
It’s not “ironic” in either sense.
See this is part of the problem.
You are lumping together two different organizations that are nothing alike as somehow part of the same cabal.
Many different people from many different groups and organizations are reaching the same conclusion about Trump and the rise of violent right wing extremism.
Different parts of society are agreeing, and then in each of these parts there are individuals making decisions.
> Revolving doors, clientelism, business opportunities, power struggle,...
Add activism, donations, candidate support and cooperating with them on a local and global level.
Seems like a text book definition of a political party.
Well it's hard to argue against it when the people being cut out are trying to pipe-bomb your headquarters as well as the Democrats :/.
I’m not saying they act evilly, but Facebook is literally controlled by one person who cannot be outvoted by every other owner. And Google is controlled by two as well [0].
[0] https://fortune.com/2019/12/05/page-and-brin-google-control/
Nobody is thinking society is just big tech people. There are a lot of people who agree with tech's decision to cut off coup enablers.
Of course the key characteristic of secret cabals is that they are secret.
While I know of no evidence for secret cabals of big tech people, having individual capable of making unaccountable decisions is a different bad thing than secret cabals.
And I responding to someone saying these were big organizations with lots of decision makers. And that’s false for Facebook and google, since they have power concentrated.
I have sympathy for the former, but not the latter. While it would be kind to reach out to the latter group and help them mesh with society, there's no requirement anyone has to nor a guarantee the pariahs would want to mesh.
No, we dont have to distinguish that. Your weak premise would justify the discrimination of atheists, anarchists, monarchists, pentecostals,marxists, epicureans... among thousands of other groups.
I dont really understand why it is so complicated.
At individual and private level I can decide who will I spend my time with, who I will invite to my place, go to the beach etc, with no coercion and I expect everybody else to have that right too.
At public level I have the expectation to serve all the people the same (ceteris paribus) unless I am forced by current legislation to not do so (like selling alcohol to a minor).
I would not extend that prohibition to a person who can request my services legally , if the person is going to pay and if he is going to behave like any other customer.
If I manage a 7/11 I would not create an ideological purity test to figure out if I will sell you gas or a soda and I think society will be way better if everybody does that too.
Speaking of landlords who discriminate, Trump has never done anything to deserve a shred of respect. Long before day one. If anything they're saving gullible people from sending money to a conman
Look back a few decades and this is exactly the same argument that segregationists were using. You've basically just said: "That shopowner has a right not to deal with blacks, why do they keep harassing that poor man by trying to buy his goods?".
> I will note the irony about people saying that we should respect society “decisions” when they didn’t respect Trump becoming president since day one . Come on pal drop the dishonesty.
Those people didn't leave pipe-bombs at both party headquarters, call for their own Vice President to be hanged, or storm the Capitol building though. It's both transparent and dishonest to try to equate the two. Especially when you consider that Trump was one of the people peddling the birther nonsense about Obama and that pretty much everyone involved with the trump campaign was actually found guilty of some form of corruption. Trump himself has only escaped charges by virtue of being the President.
The _actions_ by a group of people are resulting in these bans. Not the group's affiliation. Am I missing something here?
As for Google + Apple + Amazon (+ probably every other cloud provider and virtually every other hosting company) cutting off Parler or refusing their business in the first place: Parler was accused of not moderating "enough". This in itself is not yet criminal, given section 230 (which in this context ironically Trump wanted gone so bad he tried to hold the military budget hostage over it), and the definition of "enough moderation" was kept vague enough by Apple and Google and Amazon that Parler couldn't possibly ever comply if they wanted to.
The same argument about under-moderation can be made against facebook, e.g. when they aided - or even enabled - the Rohingya genocide, which saw thousands of people killed and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. Even the UN directly pointed fingers at facebook. Facebook admitted to their role[1], but came up with a bunch of lame excuses like that they do not really have any content moderators that understand the language.
People dug up quite a number of screenshots (anecdotal evidence) of abhorrent things written on Parler to justify them getting punished. But I found that not really convincing to single out Parler like that. If I went digging on Twitter or Facebook, or could see what people tell each other in Whatapp of Telegram groups, I would find the exact same things. I have reported things on twitter in the past, like people making extremely thinly-veiled death threats or inciting violence, and twitter's response has been sluggish and often in favor of the people talking about "nooses" and "you'll get what's coming to you" in the same sentence.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
BLM may claim not to be responsible for the horrendous roiots and crime that has been committed in its name across America.
Trump may claim that he is not responsible for the tiny (in proportion) riots that happened in DC.
(IMO, they are both responsible, thus making BLM the one with more blood on its hands. But nobody asked me.)
BLM may claim that it is in their rights to fight law and order if it causes harm to individuals.
Trump may claim it is in his right to complain about law and order when (in his opinion) it was not lawful.
(IMO, this is a finer line. He certainly can legally complain. Riots are over the line for either right or left)
Stripe processes payments for BLM, and Twitter allows their posts, etc. So IMO the line they walk is fine and biased.
...or, conversely, we should compare damage and lives lost during Black Lives Matter protests to all damage and lives lost by Trump-supporting white supremacists.
But to more directly address your point, I ask you - what crime has Trump been convicted of?
But to give you a partial answer anyway: Many criminals are never convicted. Many _known_ criminals are never convicted, due to lack of undeniable proof. Some criminals are convicted on lesser crimes, just to get them off the streets. There's plenty of evidence to support the position that Trump is a criminal. He may never be convicted but not because he's innocent.
The discussion is whether they should be able to kick someone off their platform who has been convicted of no crime, because of how integral they have become to the political process.
If it was a power company shutting off electricity to Facebok, Twitter and AWS, because they disagree with their business practices, we would have an outrage right now about how undemocratic it is.
(And I say this with all my distaste for Trumpism)
After all, a free speech advocate and a neo-nazi would both support the publication of Mein Kampf - but the former might well want to be clear they're not the latter. (and of course, to complicate the situation further, the latter may want to disguise themselves as the former)
As to why you see so many posters affirming they don't support Trump - that's because HN readers aren't Trump's target demographics: Trump only got 12% of the vote in San Francisco in 2020. IMHO it's believable that on HN, free speech advocates simply outnumber Trump supporters.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/23/just-6-of-u-s-adults-on-tw...
As for your question, probably not. And there is an interesting debate as to whether political candidates should be some sort of protected class. Though I don't think the issue is particularly urgent given that political candidates across the political spectrum (including Donald Trump) still have access to all of those things.
For the most part, payment process, web hosts, and mail providers are interchangeable, so I don't think it is a big deal that Trump can't use Stripe specifically.
Social Media is more complicated. I guess we will see how things develop, but my intuition is that Trump will open a parler account, interested parties will follow him there, uninterested parties won't, and his most noteworthy statements will be widely reported in the media. So, the same situation as when Trump was on Twitter.
Is it exclusively because of his office? Could it be construed the other direction?
Because of his office and the manner of use, yes, explicitly, under the limited public forum doctrine.
The POTUS is part of the US Government. Twitter is not.
So... no.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/06/politics/trump-tweets-officia...
>Could it be construed the other direction?
No.
Trump has appealed the decision to SCOTUS, which is still considering whether or not hear it [1]. Given that Trump's Twitter account is now banned, I suspect SCOTUS will dismiss the motion as mooted.
[1] See https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/trump-v-knight-f... for the docket information.
Twitter is not an elected official.
This is not hard.
Real-world example: T-Mobile. Their Twitter and Facebook representatives (called T-Force) have better customer service (they are more empowered to help you without supervisor escalation and fix things faster) than calling 611.
It's sad, but at least we have a digital public square?
I'm not sure if this is intended behavior (or if it works with other companies), but it solves my problems quickly.
Does hacker news count as social media? This might be one of the only social media accounts I have.
I think there's an obvious midpoint missing in the discussion between private and utility, which is monopoly, which do have additional set of laws and checks in place precisely for their strength against the free market.
preemptive "there are plenty alternatives so they are not monopolies" - if turns out these alternatives are acting in concert, it configures a cartel, which can get regulated in all the same ways.
the economical concepts behind these events aren't so alien as the folk around made them to be, their novelty is in their application to intangible assets (views and online services) but most of the issues are the same as they were decades ago and the same concepts apply, to the same conclusions.
Stripe and Twitter are not utilities. Some may want them to be. But I don’t think anyone says they currently have utility obligations under the law.
Could you give an example of this? Sounds fascinating.
Also, how far do we go with this reasoning? Stripe and PayPal refuse service so they're supposed to "Go build their own" (it costs billions to create a new service like stripe or PayPal that can compare). AWS shut you down? Build your own data center... (Again, costs millions or billions). What if next Intel or AMD decides to not sell you processors? Go build your own fab and develop your own hardware? What if the silicon miners won't sell you silicon, are you now supposed to go build your own mine?
The issue isn't that companies have a right to do it, it's that there are no viables alternatives to these large duopolies, and that "creating your own" is not an alternative.
What happens if the party in power next decides to attack religious organizations who congregate during that pandemic with the same type of concerted de-platforming? What if it's people who advocate against raising taxes who are next as deemed "morally corrupt"?
It's not hard to imagine this type of anti competitive, semi-concerted effort to de platform a new company being targeted at other things in the future. We need laws to catch up to our modern society and either break up the monopolies or put a lot more protections around the types of discrimination that are illegal, which should include political affiliation (this is law in California for employment discrimination so it's not that far fetched of an idea).
I didn't realize that Stripe's actions were due to a government order. Probably because they weren't.
You're conflating a private organization's decisions with government action. If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.
Imagine all the airlines were run by Republicans, and they universally prevented anyone who works for Democratic leaning organizations (Eg ActBlue) from flying because some small number of bad actors on their side did some bad things.
We would do well to imagine what it would be like to be prevented access with no legal recourse to an an oligopoly of services that cannot practically be bypassed, and ask ourselves what potential for abuse exists when such impactful decisions can be taken without standard legal due process.
What evidence can you provide to support your claim that various corporations are colluding to block folks?
What evidence can you provide that said corporations have a "preferred political party?"
You have no such evidence. What's more, whether or not the nebulous set of entities to which you refer (let's have specific names and specific actions).
I'd further say that "cloud" (read: someone else's servers) services, a few large social networking sites and a small subset of payment processors (I'm guessing that this is the set of corporations to which you were referring since you don't bother to be specific) do not constitute an "oligopoly."
I'd further add that there are hundreds of hosting and co-location providers, dozens of payment processors and a variety of mechanisms to share data, information and messaging.
I find your diatribe to be sorely lacking in evidence, reasoned argument and factual information.
Finally, your analogy concerning airlines is deeply flawed, as that isn't even close to what's going on.
Please provide some evidence for your claims.
Otherwise, I can only conclude that you are arguing in bad faith.
> Operation Choke Point was a 2013 initiative of the United States Department of Justice[1] which investigated banks in the United States and the business they did with firearm dealers, payday lenders, and other companies believed to be at a high risk for fraud and money laundering.
> This operation, disclosed in an August 2013 Wall Street Journal story,[2] was officially ended in August 2017,[3] and the FDIC settled multiple lawsuits by promising to Congress additional training for its examiners and to cease issuing "informal" and "unwritten suggestions" to banks.
>If the government were to attempt do as you suggest, the courts would slap them down hard.
The issues around Operation Choke Point[0] that you linked to were investigated by Congress and the Department of Justice and, as I said, smacked down hard.
The above isn't analogous to the current situation, but the result was exactly as I said it would be.
Thanks for making my point for me.
( https://reason.com/2019/08/26/secret-memos-show-the-governme... )
How is that relevant to Stripe? They aren't the government. They're not even one of the top ten biggest payment processors.
I can only conclude that you're not arguing in good faith. More's the pity.
If the baker had altogether refused to bake a cake for the gay couple, it would have been discrimination on a protected class.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/04/politics/masterpiece-colorado...
No, he was ruled in favor of because the US Supreme Court found anti-religious animus in the enforcement process leading to the State ruling against him.
> Part of this was that he was okay with baking a cake for the gay couple but NOT one that had certain messaging that would violate his faith.
No, it wasn't. The decision specifically notes that he objected to being required to make cakes for same sex weddings entirely, on both free speech and free exercise of religion grounds [0], not that he was willing to do so dependent on messaging, so any such willingness he might have had was not a basis of the decision.
Instead, the Court found animus toward Phillips’ religious views by the state commission that found against him, both expressed in the process and evidenced through difference in how Phillips was treated vs. other bakers in similar cases before the same Commission, which mean that whether or not the law could otherwise have been enforced against him, the specific government act had an impermissible purpose, requiring it to be struck down. [1]
Note: All quotes from Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. ___ (2018)
[0] “Phillips raised two constitutional claims before the ALJ. He first asserted that applying CADA in a way that would require him to create a cake for a same-sex wedding would violate his First Amendment right to free speech by compelling him to exercise his artistic talents to express a message with which he disagreed. [...] Phillips also contended that requiring him to create cakes for same-sex weddings would violate his right to the free exercise of religion, also protected by the First Amendment.”
[1] “The official expressions of hostility to religion in some of the commissioners’ comments—comments that were not disavowed at the Commission or by the State at any point in the proceedings that led to affirmance of the order—were inconsistent with what the Free Exercise Clause requires. The Commission’s disparate consideration of Phillips’ case compared to the cases of the other bakers suggests the same. For these reasons, the order must be set aside.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/masterpiece-cakeshop...
That's how you enforce civil rights laws
It's no different then trying to rent an apartment from a racist to make a case
Who are they and why do you think they send people?
His custom cakes are small works of art. If he'd be forced to create one against his beliefs, why not force a far left painter to paint a favorable portrait of Trump?
And indeed this situation has little to do with Silicon Valley corporations offering generic services to millions of people. They are like supermarkets, who should not be allowed to refuse service to anyone.
I would expect a Christian cake maker would not agree to accept my money to design a cake that worships satan for example. Likewise I wouldn’t expect a satanic cake maker to make a cake celebrating Jesus.
Would it be right to force an Islamic cake maker to make a cake featuring Muhammad’s likeness?
If he refused to provide groom&groom wedding toppers I'd fully support him but this is food not speech
Likewise I wouldn't expect him to write messages or make decorations he disagreed with
But in this case it's a simple case of discrimination
The fact that something is mentioned in a news article about a court case doesn't mean that (even if it is true) it is part of the basis for the decision. If you want to understand the basis for a court decision, it's best to read the decision itself.
This seems like a giant loophole to negate anti-discrimination laws.
Are subway "sandwich artists" able to discriminate in their art?
The baker discriminated against the couple but the supreme court punted on ruling on the laws and just said the goverment hadn't acted correctly in that case so threw it out. The law is still on record and baker has to abide by it and stop discriminating against gay couples unless the court someday rules otherwise
It's also important to note that companies aren't cutting ties with Trump because of his political ideology, they're cutting ties with him because there's a strong argument he broke the law, and they don't want to be in the awkward position of facilitating that, especially as it could open them to their own legal liability.
However not only did all the big tech companies not withdraw support for Biden or prevent his campaign from using their apps, they doubled down and censored the story so most voters would not hear of it before the elections.
Again, big double standards at play here from a moral sense.
The larger issue here is that the internet really isn't so decentralized as it used to be.
There's like 10-20 major companies that control the majority of services people use, or the underlying infrastructure that powers the whole internet. This goes against the original design of the internet which meant it to be fully decentralized so no single entity or small set of entities could prevent the flow of information.
We should try to go back in that direction, either through competition and free markets or by enforcing it via existing or new regulations to prevent situations like this from ever happening again.
Given that there's uncertainty around it, can we really conclude that "they broke the law" and that it's unfair that big tech did not withdraw their support?
One little warning from someone living in a real fascist state (Russia). It wasn't always a fascist state, but when it began to morph into one, censorship what what they started with. Of course, it was legal, because it was all private companies, rightfully executing their liberty to not show anyone they don't like...
The rich irony, of course, is that regular fascist masses that support government are brainwashed to think, they it is the marginalized opposition who are fascists.
And considering the ToS citations were I service of a potentially criminal act, fascism doesn't enter the picture: This is as much about these companies' own legal liability if they allow their platform to facilitate potential criminal activity even though it's against their own rules.
That's called regulation. We have a lot of it. Free speech isn't absolute and free markets aren't either.
I think your making my point. Your freedom of speech doesn't entitle you to use it on the stage built by someone else.
Free markets aren't either
Again, that doesn't contradict me. It would take a fundamental adjustment to the legal framework surrounding either user licensing agreements or the definition of public utilities in order to say these companies aren't allowed to enforce their current ToS.
If you want to argue that laws should change, that's fine, but then we're talking about a slider between the definition & right to own private property on the one hand, and freedom of speech using 3rd party's property on the other hand. If you want to slide it more towards the later, you are taking away from the former, and vice versa. I don't know any formula for where that line should be drawn, only that in this particular example I believe the line drawn was acceptable.
Public utilities and antitrust are not new concepts, nor is this really a private property issue. It's about power and control over our private lives (which should come first before corporations). The internet has changed everything in less than 2 decades and laws from a century ago are no longer sufficient.
When governments start asking for social media accounts at border crossings, and Twitter claims to be a public square, and even it's CEO says that social media is a human right; we need to address the new digital equivalence of our existing protections.
Here, I fixed it for you:
Violate them, and if you are not someone whose political views we support, you can take your business elsewhere.
And they aren’t even banning people for solely the latter! Representatives who continue to support the president have had no issues.
For the record I hate Trump and am a European Social Democrat.
Facebook is a US company with a lot more eyes on US activity than in Burma. They're going to see, understand, and react to events in the US much more easily than anywhere else in the world.
That isn't me condoning Facebook's activity here: they need to do a better job elsewhere in the world. What I'm saying is that their failure may be just that: a failure, not selective enforcement.
The issue here is that the platforms were used in service of activity that was arguably illegal. These platforms' failure to enforce their rules consistently doesn't mean they shouldn't have enforced them in this case, it means they should have been doing a better job all along. If you want to pass laws regarding platforms like this and free speech, it should be regulations that encourage more consistency, not less moderation of content.
They already do this in many places.
The most common example would be common carrier laws. Those aren't particularly controversial.
Do you believe that common carrier laws are some huge infringement on company rights or something?
Do you believe that common carrier laws are "fascist"?
If not, then you must admit that your previous argument is pretty silly.
In particular though, common carrier laws tend to apply to services that have been given a special privilege to have for their own use some type of public resource or special privilege. Like broadcasting frequencies or the right-of-way granted to power companies and other utilities. That isn't the case for these platforms.
You're absolutely correct that in the US no one may be punished by the state without due process. But Stripe isn't a government and refusing to do business with someone doesn't require a criminal trial.
Or are you claiming that Stripe cannot choose its customers unless a court has convicted that customer of a crime?
Classes that are protected now, were not protected at some point.
I think the discussion revolves not around whether political affiliation is a protected class, but whether it should be, in a sense- whether what is going on is good or bad for society, not whether or not it is illegal.
You are entitled to believe that it is good, of course.
The fact that the criminal is the President of the United States and his enablers is incidental to the principle.
No one wants to ban any reasonable political views. But when a political party organises public mass violence, subversion, insurrection, murder, intimidation of public officers, the attempted overthrow of a legitimate election, among other crimes, that party - and especially its leaders - loses all claims on the patience of the public and on the tolerance of private sector service providers.
Attempts to turn this into a debate about political censorship are not being made in good faith. The reality is that criminal acts took place on a scale that was truly shocking.
Anyone who provides goods and services of any kind to the individuals and organisations responsible has a moral and legal duty to stop doing so - immediately.
But it is political. This summer saw widespread political violence, including attacks on government institutions, not to mention billions in property damage, but the mainstream reaction to that was "Show me where it says protests are supposed to be polite and peaceful"[1] with massive support for the riots from Silicon Valley companies. Kaepernick praised the violence and Dorsey gave him $3m.[2] The double standard is just sickening.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-zb58uiFjU [2] https://i.imgur.com/uM1iQ5R.jpg
Lets go through some quick fire bullet points, 93% of the summer protests where peaceful, most of the damage was on insured property with no loss of life, the cause of the riots was the unashamed and unlawful treatment of minorities in America. It was a grassroots movement.
Now lets compare that to, a mob that straight away turned to violence, caused loss of life (and bashed the head of a police man with a fire extinguisher), mob had gallows and chanted to kill the vice president, pipe bombs, molotov cocktails and hostage situation zip ties where found on the scene, and it all started from a conspiracy theory that 51 different judges have considered meritless, our congress has considered meritless and the vice president of his own administration considered debunked.
I wonder who is the one with a double standard here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
>most of the damage was on insured property
Government property is insured by taxpayers
>93% of the summer protests where peaceful
I'm not sure how to confirm/disprove that statement. I'd posit that most protestors at the capitol were peaceful, but I'm not sure how to confirm/deny that either.
>mob had gallows and chanted to kill the vice president
Where I live "ACAB" is a trendy chant used to devil-ify police
EDIT: Also, is this not the same thing? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3217754/Black-Lives... - not sure how trustworthy this is
> molotov cocktails and hostage situation zip ties where found on the scene,
I have seen molotovs used at BLM protest
All this to say - it's not black and white; I also feel there clearly is some double standard going on here. I disagree with (what i think is) the premise of the capitol protests, but it does not strike me as that much worse than what people were supporting a few months ago.
No one (including the US Supreme Court) has a definition for "reasonable."
That's what has some of us alarmed.
For Trump and his cronies? Sure, there are more than enough actual laws they've broken. But let's justify action against them on actual laws, as opposed to because-SV-doesn't-like-them and has public support at the moment. Or even use the moment to pass new laws, covering the type of behavior we want to make illegal.
Instead, this feels a lot like 9/12, in that people are post-hoc justifying popular actions on a moral basis, to the detriment of legal foundations.
And as we found then, as soon as you decide "terrorists can't be reasoned with and don't deserve rights," then being able to label someone a terrorist becomes a powerful tool...
Creating protected classes significantly curtails neighbouring freedoms while increasing the government’s role in day to day interactions.
One hallmark of existing protected classes is they are somewhat objective (counterfactual: race). Political affiliation is totally subjective. If someone believes in violent death for Blacks, Jews and gays, should a Holocaust memorial group be forced to accept them? If no, then you need someone deciding which groups do and don’t merit protection. And who is and isn’t actually a member of that group.
It’s not impossible. But it has unintended consequences. More than re-delineating the private company / utility boundary. More than expanding antitrust enforcement.
Another hallmark is they tend to be mostly immutable, or unchangeable voluntarily. Society generally doesn’t accept that it’s reasonable for a person to change their gender, sexual orientation, race, age etc in order to participate in all facets of society.
I don’t think political affiliation meets that standard. Although I imagine that some might consider their political affiliation to be as core their identity as religion.
I've seen a lot of comments that act authoritative about the legal consequences, but heavily editorialized to say "the government shouldn't".
I'm not going to state my personal stance, because it's complicated and frankly, I haven't put enough thought into it to be comfortable presenting it. But, you (the reader) should be willing to forgo your kneejerk reaction (if you have one) and think about the consequences of what you're proposing when discussing changing the status quo and desired legislature to "solve" these issues.
For all intents and purposes, freedom of speech has flatlined in America. What will bring it back?
It only protects you from government, nothing else.
There are legitimate concerns regarding monopolistic behaviour of large digital gatekeepers. But we don’t solve that by deciding to restrict their speech (which is what forced speech would be). You solve it by either making them utilities or breaking them up to create more competition.
My right to speak doesn’t override you’re right to ignore me, or refuse to transmit my message.
Now there’s a knotty issue with entities like Facebook and Twitter becoming the primary ways people communicate with large audiences, but people managed before Facebook and Twitter, so they can manage again.
Or the alternative is that we say Facebook and Twitter don’t deserve to have their own speech protected. At which point someone is picking a choosing who deserves free speech.
You can’t have it both ways.
https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/11/hello-youve-been-referred...
If somebody speaks in the woods, and there's nobody there to hear it, do they make a sound?
Yes, they technically have free speech, but in reality not really.
The purpose of speech is that you might persuade somebody else. If there's nobody to talk to, you might as well not speak at all.
You can speak all you want in public spaces, on your own property (whether that be your home, your blog or your mastodon instance) mostly without limit.
But Facebook, Twitter, Google, HN or any other private organization is under no obligation to host or amplify your speech.
The government can't censor you and you may speak your mind in public spaces. You may also do so in private spaces, with the permission of the owners of those spaces.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that certain private actors are required to allow your speech. That's not true. They are responsible only to their shareholders and to a lesser extent, their customers -- and in this case their customers are advertisers and not you. You are the product being sold.
If you don't think that's right or fair, then don't interact with those private actors. If enough people chose not to deal with them, they would lose their power and influence.
I voted with my feet years ago. If you haven't, then you're part of the problem and not the solution.
I can't find it at the moment but there was recently a court case where a judge ruled that the constitutional right to Assembly was not infringed by pandemic restrictions (It is illegal in several US jurisdictions to assemble with more than N people in a private space) because people could freely assemble on online platforms like Facebook and Twitter. If the digital public square does not allow for free assembly, and the government forbids you from assembling in a physical public space, then it seems plausible to me that we have constructively eliminated certain constitutional rights.
When capitalism revealed its ability to create abusive monopolies, we created new laws to mitigate those harms.
When the whole worlds discourse flows through a few centralized social media companies, as a society we are free to imagine new legal concepts and regulations to deal with the unforeseeable consequences of these new phenomena.
Where did I say that wasn't appropriate?
I strongly believe that those big social media companies not only have too much power and influence, but that their business models are exploitative and morally repugnant.
Which is why I don't use them. At all.
In fact, I detailed[0] how I thought this issue should be dealt with the other day.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
If you can't convince enough people that your message is worth propagating, maybe it isn't. If you can, you will have the means.
As I had mentioned in another comment a few days ago, it stands to reason that were the government to outsource the censorship to private entities (like Orban is now doing in Hungary, where almost all the media is in his pockets) than everything would be technically legal, even though it would definitely be against the spirit of the law.
As a matter of the fact the US right does seem to say that the same thing is happening right now, i.e. that the US mainstream media is "in the pockets of the left" hence the censorship.
No - 'Freedom of Speech' is at an all time high.
The internet gives every single person a giant soap box to stand on.
You can communicate, in public, with anyone in the world.
25 years ago, you had no voice.
Now, everyone can be a 'journalist' or 'agitator' or whatever.
The level of open communication possible today was unthinkable 25 years ago.
25 years ago most people didn't have access to 'most news'. The NYT maybe was accessible by the elite in most towns, but the LA times was not. Now it's all available to everyone.
These platforms haven't changed that much in terms of their policies.
If you called someone the n-word or tried to coordinate murder of some public official you would be banned.
Bannon was calling for Dr. Fauci to be beheaded a few days ago. That's what got him banned from Twitter.
Gen. Flynn was calling for public officials to be executed. He was banned.
Get it?
Twitter has not really changed that much - the public, and their expectations of 'freedom of expression' in the face of politics has changed.
This is a distraction. Political speech enjoys the highest level of protection in the US, political speech is one of the primary motivators behind the existence of constitutionally protected speech in the US.
Private companies deciding not to service the head of the executive seems to be nearly the opposite of that, unless I understood this wrongly (which is entirely possible). Think of a newspaper (=private entity) decides to boycott a president and not write anything about him. Wouldn't it be the polar opposite of free speech if the president then had the power to force them to write about him?
I get that a payment service is not the same as a newspaper, but it is still a private entity.
Back in the day, you had to rack your own servers in your own data centers and manage them yourself. Had any of these 'free speech' services spent any time considering how reliant they were on 3rd party services, they should never have engaged those companies in the first place.
There was a day when you had to build your own servers to host your own websites. Not that long ago, imo.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/gab-reports-growth-in-the-mi...
Just FYI, some countries have made it a protected class, e.g.: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0082/latest/... (see 21(1)(j))
If you are conservative or lean to it, its incredibly disheartening. You have to consistently justify to these people you aren't brainwashed, because their default idea is that you are. Sort of the same way about serious religious belief if you have one; people default assume you are nuts and at best you can work your way up to "he's nuts but he is our nut."
It's scary to me, and to be honest my political views are starting to move towards "limit the power other people can affect you as much as possible" because its now evident how people will happily deplatform any unpopular person beyond the real justification. I can buy removing Trump's speech due to incitement, but it keeps going and going-like we literally see fox news next, and what then?
The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
Looks like my choices are to stuff everything I believe down deep inside and hope I can participate in society, keep a job, support my family, etc. OR to speak up and risk losing everything. This is the true mob to fear. Everything is being torn down to get the "bad guys". Everything.
FYI, political affiliation is protected from discrimination in CA, NY, and DC.
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-employers-discri...
Lawful political activity is protected from workplace discrimination. That’s a far stretch from making it a general protected class, and wouldn’t prevent Stripe from refusing to work with the Trump campaign.
There's no such thing as a “general protected class”; there are different lists (and different effects of the status) of protected classes in various categories of law (public accommodations, employment, housing, etc.)
These tech giants have made themselves into a lattice on which modern society attaches itself, and their pervasiveness will only continue to grow in 21st century America. We risk them being in bed with government. And when nominally private, major industry is aligned with government to effect political ends, there's a word for that, and we've seen that before.
Trump just stood up and asked for his people to go to the capitol - one of his former campaign managers called for beheading members of government.
Calling out his lies - a la politifact and many others - hasn’t worked to deradicalize. Fact check verifications next to the content haven’t. So - just shutting off the calls for violence and lies are the next step.
“Opposition to Trump looks inept”(?) The opposition just swept congress and the presidency, crushed the popular vote, and even members of his party are strongly against his actions. Ineptitude is the Trump’s legal challenges against the election and the “4 Seasons Total Landscaping” fiasco.
Trump can raise funds in many ways. He can get checks. No one is required to allow someone to raise funds on their site - let freedom ring!
I don't think even the last election was a success for democrats to be honest, it was a pretty close call. But that is another metric. Trump became president and had his full term. I don't think past you would call even the current situation a success, you just reduced your expectations.
The supposed fact checkers had a clear bias and couldn't establish trust. That will take some time to get back and I doubt democrats will have success with programs that require any form of solidarity because you still define yourself as opposition to Trump. There is still a huge and solidified division. Hard to govern, but we will see.
This is just not happening. Except apparently in the minds of many HNers who live in some bizarre alternate reality.
Visa is not a utility. I would be open to debating whether they should be one.
The flip side of such a designation is it would likely require the government indemnify Visa against fraud losses. The line between deplatforming for fraud risk (the ostensible reason for Visa’s aversion to porn) and for objectionable content is difficult to draw.
Perhaps these bans are happening not because of political affiliation but due to the messages these particular people (e.g., Trump) are espousing.
Parler go banned because it's full of message calling for (e.g.) Mike Pence to be hanged and other such things, and Parler isn't / can't do much about it, and its infrastructure providers (AWS, app stores) do not want any part of it per their ToS.
No one has cut off Mitch McConnell because he hasn't been calling forth angry mobs to storm Congress (or the White House).
Notice a pattern? Left wing heroes can say anything they want and Twitter doesn’t ban them.
Actor Peter Fonda called for violently assaulting Trump's underage child on Twitter in 2018 (his account was not permanently banned), and that's very typical posting from leftist celebrities on Twitter these past four years.
Thousands of violent posts were in the "Hang Mike Pence" Twitter trend that was going on the other day. People have been openly calling for executions for treason and similar on Twitter in relation to the Capitol riots. There was widespread cheering and celebrating when that woman got shot in the neck by Capitol Police, I read thousands of Tweets that were literally cheering for her death, all on Twitter, and nobody gives a fuck.
The double standard by Twitter is beyond disgusting. It's psychopath behavior.
That trended because Trump supporters built a gallows and chanted “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol on Wednesday.
* https://www.newsweek.com/twitter-stops-hang-mike-pence-trend...
Pretty sure it is in California.
Government program != utility designation. DARPA, NASA and the Manhattan Project were not utilities. PG&E is a utility. It requires political consent to make significant changes.
I’m not saying utilities can’t be innovative. Amtrak and the Post Office are utilities, and they experiment. But they have obligations private businesses don’t, and that slows things down.
The ongoing purge -- would it not be seen as treason, as an act to in fact subvert/weaken a position of POTUS and therefore directly destabilize the US government?
Twitter and Stripe are acting in coordination - literally conspiring - with every other big tech company to take a specific action. When they do that they're acting as an illegal cartel and must be prosecuted accordingly. This is the kind of coordinated cartel behavior that banana republics and third world countries have that behave exactly like these companies are and do so out in the open (and always with the political support of the group with the most power, to target their foes). We're supposed to have anti-trust laws to deal with conspiring mega corporations.
The First Amendment promises both free speech and free assembly. Core to the latter is the freedom not to assemble. This freedom is regulated. You can’t refuse to do business with protected classes. But political affiliation is not a protected class.
There are utilities, which have limited freedom not to assemble. Then there are private persons and private businesses. Stripe and Twitter are clearly the latter. AWS and Visa feel like the former, though they are legally the latter.
The cost of switching private activity to a utility model is a loss of innovation and an increase in political involvement. We are re-evaluating, as a society, the balance between the freedoms of speech and assembly. Let’s not forget these are freedoms in balance, not a spectrum of tyranny and anarchy.