According to what the companies say:
- The President incited some people last week to engage in violent behavior at and towards Congress.
- There is evidence that further violence is being planned via a variety of platforms.
- The platforms are attempting to limit their exposure to facilitating such actions.
Some people think that the companies have ulterior motives. I will leave it to you to decide what you think the real reasons are.
How can we even exist as a society is if don't we force people to use the framework of governance?
exactly the same point that China was making when the US politicians were supporting the Hong Kong protestors.
and similar point Fidel Castro was making when he let the Cubans escape into Florida.
Isn't it already the case that it is simple to coordinate violent acts against people one doesn't agree with?
>How can we even exist as a society is if don't we force people to use the framework of governance?
Why wouldn't we be able to?
Remember that the people in charge of deciding what is and is not legitimate may have their own agenda and interests that will not always align with yours, and will change over time, even capriciously
We could prevent humans from using communications technology to plan violence by banning all such technology. That would be an unacceptable price imho.
There is _always_ collateral damage. You can’t ban all the bad content and only the bad content. There’s a wide range of mitigation strategies. If we discussed specifics it might possible to establish some first principles.
If end-to-end encryption were banned and the US government had full access to all private communication they might be able to stop some violence. On the other hand many governments, the US included, would likely use that power to commit violence. I would not support this particular strategy.
These sort of simplistic quips reveal that either: not much thought has gone into what your saying, or what your saying is a propagandizing effort to conceal ulterior motives.
Does it elude you that this heightened concern in quashing all discussions of violence seems to be rather targeted at a certain segment of the population? Are they the only ones that "plan violence"? Or the only ones where violence originates from?
If your goal is saying nobody "should be able to make plans involving violence," then you're saying nobody should be able to make plans of any sort without being surveiled, so that a determination can be made as to whether those plans involve violence. Who's doing the determining? What if the violence is ostensibly to an end the determiner believes is righteous?
The issues at hand are not so simple as your comment suggests, and it creates a feeling that you're trying to pull one over on people.
There are issues here that needs addressing, the events at the capitol yes, but an equally if not more important issue of how do we map old notions of private property and public property/infrastructure onto socio-techno society where these notions are converging? How do we bring the rights and norms of a healthy, functional, non-repressive society from the pre-internet world to the post internet world?
Violence pre-internet did not elicit calls of "ban all telephones," or "ban them from the telephone network," or "confiscate their printer."
We've barely begun to form the language to talk about these things, and to take in the scope and complexity of the issues arising from the way society and technology have evolved. Glib comments of "violence is bad," make it harder to discuss in a productive way.
Violence is bad. The violence at the capitol was bad. And the violence that rocked American cities all summer was bad. Great concern about quashing all discussion of violence was curiously absent this past summer? Well, discussions of it were jeered, quashed and censored unless you were praising it.
Is that a conversation you'd like to have?
My personal view happens to be that it is a good thing if people can plan violence on the internet. The alternative is to move further in the direction of state monopolisation of violence, which I view to be a move further away from democracy (and I view democracy to be a disarable thing).
As always the means need to be weighed against the end.
There is always a line between black and white that some human has to look at and decide "yeah this is ban-worthy" or not. Sometimes it's obvious - sometimes it's not so much.
One example: remember that "documentary" "Loose Change" that came out after 9/11 and questioned if it was an inside job? I watched it out of curiosity at the time. It was later debunked - but if it had been just immediately removed from every site and nearly impossible to watch I think that could have had a reverse effect. Instead I was able to evaluate the details (or "misinformation", in some cases) from both sides.
So, I believe the previous poster is implying there are always going to be subjective, biased, and sometimes morally questionable issues that arise when censoring information across multiple major platforms - similar to the issue of allowing encryption vs banning it. If you could ban encryption only for child pornography distribution purposes then yes that would be great, but unfortunately that comes at a cost (and it's not like people/politicians haven't tried to do just that).
I don't think we have stepped into full great firewall of China level censorship or anything, but this is a step in that direction - for better or for worse.
For a long time "Learn to code" was a statement made by journalist to the working class about how they need to better themselves and adapt to the changing work requirements. Now it is considered harassment because it was being thrown back at the same journalists when they started losing their jobs.
Do you think that the people pushing for these laws and restrictions are doing so because they want to help your side or because they want power? And once they get the power they seek, do you think they will allow for the change you wish to enact to come to fruition, especially if it runs the risk of diminishing their power?
When this came up yesterday, someone raised the common objection "why not just ban all politics then?" If anyone has that question, the thread is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25711241
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
HN's guidelines are not ideologically driven. They're designed to help the site achieve its mandate of being a place for intellectually curious conversation [1]. People can't be in curiosity mode and battle mode at the same time—the nervous system doesn't work that way. (They probably can't be in curiosity mode and ideology mode at the same time either, but that's not really where we draw the line.)
When accounts are using HN for battle, smiting enemies, lashing out, and generally contributing to burning this place down, we ask them to stop, and if after repeated warnings they don't stop, we ban them. That's not because we disagree with them ideologically—we ban all accounts that do this regardless of what side they're on. It's because it's the only way to preserve this community and prevent it from destroying itself the way internet forums usually do [2,3]. The goal is for HN is to stay interesting, and scorched earth isn't interesting [4]. We've tried to be true to this core value from the beginning; it hasn't changed and won't change for as long as we can manage to keep it. We do get better over time at articulating it and iterating on the ruleset for keeping it [5].
Actually, the irony is that such accounts resemble the corresponding enemy accounts (and vice versa) far more than either set resembles the majority of users here, who are coming to the site in curiosity mode.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[5] The guidelines have changed a lot in the last year or two. For example, they used to say "Be civil", but now they say "Be kind". That wording reflects the intended spirit better. There are many other things like that, but none of them have changed the core value of the site—they're all an attempt to serve and preserve it better.
BTW, I would personally ban all politics from HN.
Banning all politics from HN is not an option, for reasons I've explained many times. See the links here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25723581.
Until the companies being discussed have the right to use force against you your argument holds no water.
I mean Trump did everything in his power to become the next Putin.
Your concern about sending people to the Gulag is pretty far-fetched.
This is the turning point where as a society, we need to decide where the new line for utilities needs to be, and what parts of the internet and financial systems are fundamental to maintaining the fabric of society.
What ever we decide at this crossroads, may end up haunting us for a very long time.
Besides federated dark web anarchy, which is a nice thing to try in parallel.
If you are a website which allows users to publicly post some kind of media, and have a user base >N per year, then you have to connect your website to the public moderator API, and pay some amount for the privilege.
Social media companies don't want responsibility for moderating things people publish on them, nor the blame when they get it wrong (or when they get it right but some people disagree, or when it's just plain judgement call).
At the same time, most people probably don't trust social media companies to do that moderation correctly. Also, as individual and companies we want some certainty about the rules and access to timely recourse if we do get moderated.
Not having moderation isn't an option (see child porn etc.).
(The fact that these are international platforms makes this extra difficult.)
It isn't just ulterior motives, there is an argument to be made that they do not have the competence to police their own policies. Twitter's argument for what constituted incitement had nothing to do with the words Trump used and everything to do with the context in which they were typed.
It is impossible to use that standard of evidence for action and get fair results. If it were possible, "oh yeah everyone knows that" would be a normal standard in the court system. It isn't, because we have established through countless moral panics and knee-jerk reactions over history that higher standards are needed to get fair results.
Media companies as powerful as YouTube using substandard evidence to moderate political debate is huge news. With this standard they aren't half as suitable a platform for political news as they used to be.
By "exposure", perhaps the commenter means possible sedition charges.
To me, this is further evidence that these websites are neither common carrier nor public forum. The telephone company is not going to cut off anyone's service because of seditious communications. Nor is any public place going to ban people from committing seditious acts there. They will just be arrested when they commit the the crime. Will any ISP terminate anyone's service for fear of enabling sedition. These companies like Google are, first and foremost, websites. The website is the company. If there is no website, there is no company.
What is interesting about this is that these websites are protected by Section 230. Are there limits to Section 230 protection. Do they end at sedition.
Times Square is just the first public place that I thought of. Not every public place is used for advertising. What if it was the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The point is that, generally, necessary permits notwithstanding, people can enter always public places and communicate with the public. That is why they are deemed public places not private ones.
I am not even sure what advertising has to do with this. Maybe I missed something in the story. I was under the impression it was a YouTube "channel" getting banned not some customer's ability to purchase ads from Google to be shown on YouTube.
https://docs.ipfs.io/how-to/websites-on-ipfs/link-a-domain/#...
I don't want this to sound wrong, but I perceive most of the people complaining about censorship to be hypocrites. They'd be the first to censor if they were in charge of these platforms. They are some of the first to ban in moderated communities like reddit.
The reason they're upset is because they are not in control. I think in some ways they are like the people scared of change, and the once change has taken place they are scared of not being in control.
Based on what? I and many people I'm close to in real life are constantly concerned about these escalating erosions of expression and all prefer the less-moderated corners of the internet. None of us have ever sought out control and grew up consistently annoyed at one-sided media outlets, even if they represented the perspective we happened to agree with at the time. If we still use reddit (most of us are falling off), it tends to be a small subset of niche communities that don't focus on meta-politics or have auto-banning protocols. These are the people I see complaining about this around me. Is it just because I'm not on twitter?
Heck, I signed up for Gab and was almost immediately banned from the entire site after sharing my liberal opinion.
> The reason they're upset is because they are not in control.
Do you notice how that starts me, as someone who is firmly anti-censorship, off on the defensive as you seem to view me as an insincere or stupid bad guy?
> I think in some ways they are like the people scared of change, and the once change has taken place they are scared of not being in control.
As a general principle I’m for the idea that we aught to allow free expression of ideas, especially online since that is the way to share ideas. Life happens very differently for people even just domestically in the US, and when our viewpoints come into conflict I’d rather understand what they have to say and talk about it. How is that possible to do when there’s a party in the middle that is able to determine what you’re not allowed to read? I'm scared of not being in control of that and thus censorship in general, not about having my version of truth be published.
We're also seeing the refusal of legal representation, which seems nearly unprecedented. At some point, the only thing left will be civil death [0].
The social network bans are businesses protecting themselves from people whom threaten their business. Like a fast food restaurant refusing to serve customers who smoke crack in the restaurant.
The platform and infrastructure bans are also businesses protecting themselves but not from people, rather from other businesses. This is on level with U-haul banning drug cartels from renting their trucks.
No one's civil liberties are being taken away
Funny, Didn't see all this crying about censorship when MC & Visa cut off pornhub...
edit: just to be clear, I mean when MC & Visa decided pornhub was a potential liability, they cut them off. When companies decide Trump or Parler are a liability - they do the same - they cut them off. Thats just capitalism.
I can't clobber you over the head with a product I bought just like how many countries have laws to say I can't kick you out of private property that's also a public square.
However, you can evict me from the property and charge me with trespassing, which is closer to whats happening here.. edit: Hell, you can even infringe my 2nd amendment rights and ban me from having a gun on your property!
Also, I'm not sure 'private' property can be a 'public' square. At least in New England, the town commons was public land ?
Quickly looking this up brings me to the supreme court ruling, Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins [1], which involved laws that were specific to the state of California.
Notably, the applicability of this ruling was narrowed over time. Despite this, it has been brought up as an argument in situations with circumstances that differed from those of the original ruling, where questions of its applicability can be easily raised.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
edit: I seem to remember my son's class not being able to petition in front of a grocery store in California like 20 years ago...Wonder if it had been narrowed by then?
We're entitled to an attorney when defending ourselves from criminal prosecution, but where does it say we're entitled to legal counsel at any other time?
At the end of the day Law Firms are businesses, and again these are just businesses protecting their own self interests.
If they end up needing legal counsel for a criminal trial they'll receive it. Otherwise they can just grab a phonebook and start calling ambulance chasers until they find one who will meet their other legal needs.
Access to legal representation is similarly an ideal that can't be reduced to its partial encoding in a very flawed legal system.
Does corporate personhood extend to the idea of legal representation?
Does the right to legal representation mandate that any legal firm be compelled to provide counsel to any client who demands it?
Read the PRC's constitution some time and see all the rights that it guarantees, yet no one actually enjoys those rights. They exist on paper only.
You continually ask questions that attack positions which no one has suggested. I've had to ignore about 80% of your comments because they are just diversions. No one said a word about "corporate personhood", for example, and no one is even talking about legal representation of corporations. It's not possible to have a meaningful discussion like this.
Parler is a business, not a person.
To be clear, I don't think that the Trump lawsuits had any merit or should have been brought in the first place. But they should absolutely have been allowed to go through the normal legal process so they could be convincingly rebutted. Sending hundreds of threats to law firms should not be a political tactic in a democracy. That does nothing but give ammunition and validity to conspiracy theorists.
Your first comment was responding to someone talking about AWS, Apple, and Google dropping Parler. The discussion was around the right of lawyers to drop clients, clients being so toxic that no one is willing to represent them, legal counsel as a right, and the ramifications of a client being unable to secure counsel.
No one was talking about mass harassment but you.
> I've had to ignore about 80% of your comments because they are just diversions.
You're trying to argue something completely out of context. That 80% of comments you're ignoring are about the topic at hand.
That of course would not mean pressing private firms into public service.
Even so that wouldn't apply here. Parler lost their private counsel, not their legal counsel.
[0] https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/11/1... [1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/13/law-firm-drops-trum... [2] https://thenewamerican.com/new-low-democrats-approve-harassm...
If we affirm that the right to legal counsel is a human right and that corporations also receive that right, how do we protect lawyers from clients which ignore legal counsel and file frivolous that can threaten the lawyer's right to practice law?
Alternatively (or additionally) they could move the damage from the server side to the client: think OSes and browsers, not to mention hardware. It won't be long before "secure boot" technologies prevent people from installing "extremist" operating systems.
It's so unfortunate we don't have that anymore though. I wonder who's responsible for that...
*Modulo DDOS attacks. Maybe Cloudflare et al should also be required by law to serve everyone regardless of content.
https://www.digitalocean.com/blog/digitaloceans-position-on-...
Other services include Twilio, Okta Zendesk, Sendgrid, Stipe, etc.
At the very least, I hope this encourages companies to backup their Cloud data frequently and separately.
why it is being banned is that it has convinced people to attack the government because they believe the government has done things (for example, “stealing elections”) that it has not done.
big tech has apparently decided that they do not want to be blamed when the government has to shoot a bunch of delusional people to stop them from committing violent crimes based on lies
what’s novel is the centralized nature of social media (in terms of # of people reached from a single source) and the fact that some incredibly wealthy companies control these sources and face an existential risk if their platforms are used to create enough civil unrest that whoever ends up controlling the government is convinced that these companies are too dangerous to leave unregulated.
Many, in fact, were not, even if some participation in the practice at the time. Look at the pushing of anti-Western intellectualism and rejection of the basic tools of logical reasoning, which trace their roots far back to the Ancient Greeks, for being the "Master's Tools" to ensure supremacy.
At the end of every disagreement is violence as the final method of conflict resolution. That these ideas are pushed, is just another log on the fire. Part of classical logic and rhetoric was teaching the ability to utilize them to defuse and avoid violent resolution of disagreement through reference to an objective or common reality.
You may not think the above poster has a point, but they most certainly do.
But their leap to "if X is banned and Y is similar to X and Y isn't banned then X can't be banned" is still wrong because it is not the similarities between X and Y that is causing X to be banned.
It is the fact that X is being used to inspire violent opposition to the government that is the source of the banning.
Or to make it much less abstract:
A bunch of people broke into one of the most important buildings in the US government, killed a police officer and wounded others who were trying to stop them, stole stuff including computers belong to high ranking government officials, broke stuff, humiliated the government, and had every appearance of being willing to cause physical harm to political leaders because of X.
X was supported by social media.
Social media hosts reasonably concluded that the government may cause them to suffer negative consequences if they did not do something to prevent this from happening again.
Because of Y, some people have gotten into fights on the internet and a few individuals have found their employment and social options constrained. The government is not nearly as interested in this.
As a result there’s been a wave of deplatforming of the voices that helped encourage that culture.
It is indeed unfortunate that this came to pass but it was a necessary response.
When you test the limits and protections, you ultimately change the nature of them. This is why you really want to avoid doing so in a free society because then you’re faced with the negatives of being forced to restrict freedoms to prevent that test from happening again and facing the threat of the next time someone trying, them having learned the lessons of how to test the limits much more effectively.
I’m sure some of my conservative friends would laugh if I told them this site makes me look like Regean in comparison to some others.
All good fun of course. I believe that everyone is entitled to their opinion and ones I disagree with shouldn’t be hidden, but that itself is just my opinion.
Seems like whatever battle Trump and his faction was waging behind the scenes the last 4 years failed and he simply failed to win over enough power/influence to his side. We'll never know what really happened, we can just guess.
But feels like history is happening. I don't think any of us have lived to through anything like this. I know I certainly haven't.
Before 2018?
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/01/35-times-capito...
These people are upset because they perceive that different standards are being applied to the same actions because of the politics of the actors involved. I don't think this is going to go away as a result of us clutching our pearls at the horrific violation of our sacred legislative building.
what is the evidence of this intent?
This isn't getting walked back.
He relied on "big tech" to deliver his world view.
How Tim Cook Won Donald Trump’s Ear> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-tim-cook-won-donald-trumps-...
i've been spending ten times more time on Gab this year. just saying.
Gab is so overloaded these days it's hard to log in.
Which makes sense of you believe that some listeners will simply not have the interest in jumping over to a new platform. Repeat several times and with every platform shift the audience reduces.
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Rate limited so editing my reply for comment below
Thanks for the link. I couldn't find it. If this is the situation then it's extremely bad. The entire situation is fucked up. We literally are in a Censorship era. But the silver lining is that now there will be serious efforts into creating a decentralised internet that isn't controlled by any Big Tech Cartel. In the same way Bitcoin was a response to 2008 economic crises. This crises will create strong alternative platforms. No doubt about it. It's no longer a matter of if but when. Incentives for an alternative internet have never been stronger.
> “We’re going to try our best to get back online as quickly as possible. But we’re having a lot of trouble because every vendor we talk to says they won’t work with us. Because if Apple doesn’t approve and Google doesn’t approve, they won’t.”
This research was done at a time when there was little to no backlash against Big Tech. When you factor in a billion+ people moving from one platform to another it is not the platform that is deplatforming users but it is the users abandoning the platform. I have seen it happen multiple times in my life: From Yahoo Messenger to Orkut, from Orkut to Myspace, from Myspace to Facebook. I have witnessed these shifts happen in India and it is crazy how quickly these platforms that had an established presence lose their dominance literally overnight. I bet that research you refer to hasn't included the Indian psyche in the mix. We move in hordes. All it takes is for one trusted and respected family member or relative to suggest jumping ship. Everyone just follows the leader blindly. Those companies that understand this psyche of Indians and cater to this mindset will do extremely well in India. But it is a double-edged sword. We don't have attachments to any platform. If we see that the platform is going against us, repeatedly, we just shift en-masse. I have seen it happen numerous times to know this time is no different (the most recent one that comes to mind is public orchestrated ban on TikTok after the Indo-China clashes. The Government was forced to ban TikTok after a majority of Indians demanded that it be banned). In few months WhatsApp will lose its dominance completely. The shift has only just begun.
If you don't believe me you can save this HN comment and revisit it in a few months from now.
We've seen this happen in the U.S. too with the recent conservative shift from Twitter to Facebook and Parler. If Parler does go down due to AWS pulling the plug, we will again see a shift to a new platform - it's a matter of where and when, not if.
Exactly right! No platform is permanent. No company is permanent.
To be honest, I just think this is how political infrastructure restabilizes. Heavy is the head on which sits the Crown [and vulnerable the neck], as they say. Once impedance mismatch hits critical levels, out come the fangs. Fangs coming out either prompts more impedance mismatch (crackdowns and self-preservation plays by established actors), prompting more crazy, or people start getting the message, and stability is trended back toward.
It's the most simultaneously fascinating and horrifying dynamic equilibrium problem I've ever witnessed play out in my life.
Something that some of you may have missed: This banning thing already moved into the infrastructure/cloud services layer (AWS):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25707959