Why are people that believe in regulation of the world's largest corporations suddenly laissez-faire libertarians?
If you have opposed the Citizen's United ruling for a decade, don't suddenly act like you care about a corporation's civil liberties, including freedom of association and freedom of expression.
The answer is obvious: both sides want power more than they want to stick to their expressed ideals.
I believe social media should be regulated more tightly. Until then they have the freedom to remove the content according to their TOS.
Just because I’m pointing out that they have the freedom it doesnt mean I believe they should continue to have the freedom.
Government regulations are desperately needed.
Even more so, government enforcement of existing regulations are needed. There’ve been many threats of violence on social media with few being investigated.
For instance, many progressives are advocates of people losing their jobs for harassing coworkers. If you look at this position in isolation, it looks like they're arguing for a cold corporatism, that anyone who threatens the reputation of the corporation should be thrown onto the streets. However, many progressives are also advocates of stronger social safety nets for people who lose their jobs, whether by their own misdeeds or misfortune - from increased unemployment (or even UBI), to stronger tenants' protections, to government-provided healthcare. Firing someone for their misdeeds is much less cruel once those safety nets are in place, and the moral calculus very rapidly shifts to protecting their coworkers.
I would also argue that there are a lot of folks (myself included) that see the curtailing of speech - regardless of "side", as a real long-term threat to productive and open communication. We need actual discourse and understanding, or all we're going to get is more us-vs-them polarization and ramping up of rhetoric and violence.
I strongly disagree with most of the opinions being voiced on the (far) right, but if they don't happen in the open they will fester into something grotesque and far more dangerous. Just because I'm disgusted by the opinions of a group of people doesn't it's a good idea for me to make the situation worse by silencing them. Not least of all because we will eventually reap what we've sowed once they grab power again.
I still can't help but shake the feeling that there are those with a real vested interest in a continuing and growing divide (and conquering) of the populace, regardless of the (externalized) cost.
Once all this calms down, we can address the excessive power of the platforms with antitrust, so there are more of them to choose from.
So much of the executive craziness of the last 4 years is due to the ever growing power of the executive branch and executive orders being de facto law.
All this presidential overreach is about to (hypocritically) be put to use and further expanded.
I also believe that every association of citizens should have civil liberties. I have no desire or plans to become Facebook, but I want the freedom to make much smaller companies (or collectives, or charitable organizations, or whatever) and have the discretion to associate with whomever I want. If that right is taken away from Facebook, I am harmed.
If the ability to become Facebook-scale is taken away from Facebook, I am not harmed, because I have no interest in doing so. So that's what I advocate.
(If you search through my comment history, you can see this is not a new belief for me, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19338090 from two years ago agreeing unironically with Paul Graham's strawman suggestion that Google should not exist, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24797482 from three months ago arguing in favor of Elizabeth Warren's proposal, and motivation, to break up Big Tech in a specific way following specific principles.)
If your side wants power more than you want to stick to your expressed ideals, go ahead, but don't drag me down to your level. My side's ideals look like an opportunistic and self-contradictory version of laissez-faire libertarianism simply because our position is not laissez-faire libertarianism at all.
¬(A & ¬A) = ¬A | A = True
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That has nothing to do with enjoying watching this chickens come home to roost.
The political scientist and author Frank Wilhoit talked about it in his works:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
1. These companies have every right to legally censor those they disagree with.
2. By exercising that right they put themselves at risk of being regulated more stringently (as utilities for example) when they demonstrate inelasticity in consumer choice.
3. I'd rather them not be treated as utilities because that hampers competition and thus impedes efficiency.
4. Your statement above is a farcical caricature of conservative ideology. Every product/service deserves a debate on what regulation is appropriate but as a society regulation only exists because bad actors necessitated its creation. No one wants car seats for their 8 year olds - we'd much rather be trusted to do the right thing.
The quote was made by a different Frank Wilhoit on the Crooked Timber blog / community.
Investigative work here: https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1183470106816331776
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit
The quote you're referring to is from a comment on a web page left in 2018:
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
The name in the comment links to his site:
He's a music composer.
But I'm not knowledgeable about history, so do elaborate if you know details please.
The Girondists were considered right only because Jacobins were super left and ended up killing thousands of priests, what few nobles they could still find, tens of thousands of suspected royalists in mass executions, and eventually the Girondists themselves too for being too soft. The Girondists went to the guillotine singing The Marseilles! Certainly not the royalists that lot.
I recommend the “Revolutions” podcast - about 30 hours worth of the French Revolution is better than any movie.
Also the history of revolutions is very educational in this day and age. I for one hope we will never experience anything like it.
You don’t know what the term “protected class” means, and you should probably stop using it.
“Woman” isn’t a protected class, “sex” is. “Christian” isn’t a protected class, “religion” is.
Veteran status and age over 40 are notable examples; you are absolutely permitted to discriminate against non-veterans and against people under 40.
Many accusations of hypocrisy boil down to just that - different people with different opinions treated by the outsiders as a homogenous group.
Even in 1976, Carter won with the traditional new deal coalition of southerners and northeast progressives. He won South Carolina by the same margin as Massachusetts. Even in 1980 against Reagan, Carter performed much closer to Reagan in the south than his overall national performance (outright winning Georgia, but coming close in most southern states).
The current alignment of southern states with Republicans really dates to the late 1980s to early 1990s, when Republicans started flipping Senate seats in the south.
Pinning this on Democrats’ support for the Civil Rights Act two decades before is one theory, but another is the industrialization of the southern economy. Southern New Deal Democrats represented agricultural states against protectionist northern industrial interests. But look at the economy of places like Georgia and Tennessee today. They’re built on low taxes and low regulation to draw companies away from high tax high regulation northern states. That started happening in the 1980s. Georgia is a really archetypal example of this: it’s probably the most openly pro-business big city in the country, and has a famously cooperative relationship between Atlanta Democratic mayors and Georgia Republican governors centered around attracting companies from places like New York: https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/with...
It is no more reasonable to say that Democrats were staunch opponents of civil rights into the 1960s (Truman integrated the military!) than it is to say that Republicans were religious conservatives. Southern Democrats opposed civil rights, and Northern Republicans were New Deal economic populists.
I did the (probably pointless) exercise a few years ago of reading the GOP party platform documents from 1972 through 2012, tagging each with specific issues like "block grant benefits to states" or "oppose campaign finance restrictions". I don't believe for a moment that these documents are representative of the real party, but it's interesting that you can watch the GOP's position change so clearly over time. Into the late 1970s, the GOP was open to abortion!
The parties have held relatively coherent positions since the 1980s; I think when people talk about the roles the parties have had in US history, as opposed to specific politicians, we should probably limit ourself to the parties of Reagan and Mondale and their successors.
Republicans had been trying to win southern whites since the turn of the 20th century. That caused a large number of African Americans to abandon the party. They started voting overwhelmingly Democrat in 1936.
But the Democratic Party didn't support the Civil Rights Act until 1964. And the south remained solidly Democratic well into the 1980s, outside of Presidential contests. Many completely white rural southern counties voted for Carter and Clinton. What explains that timeline?
You have to look at the economics and the law. FDR's Democratic Party was recognizably modern: technocratic, and proponents of the administrative state, regulation, and economic redistribution. Southern whites stayed in this coalition because the south was poor and agrarian, and had interests averse to those of northern businesses. New Deal programs were instrumental in industrializing the southern economy: https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/.... In 1930, the southeast was the poorest region, with half the national average income. By 1970, the gap had closed dramatically, to 80%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-wealth-u-s-geogra...
The Republican Party, meanwhile, continued to be a small-government, anti-regulation party during this time. Goldwater tried to win the south by opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on small-government grounds, and while that worked in a few deep-south states, he lost every normally Republican state except Arizona.
By the time Reagan came along, a couple of things had changed:
1) The south's economy had dramatically industrialized, creating prosperous suburbs of the kind Reagan won all over the country.
2) The legal debate over the Civil Rights Act had long since been replaced by debates over affirmative action. The 1980 Republican Platform reflects this:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p... ("However, equal opportunity should not be jeopardized by bureaucratic regulations and decisions which rely on quotas, ratios, and numerical requirements to exclude some individuals in favor of others, thereby rendering such regulations and decisions inherently discriminatory.").
With the illegality of de jure discrimination settled by Brown v. Board, and commercial discrimination settled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the debate shifted to addressing what we'd call today "structural racism." And on that point, the Reagan platform reflects the same limited-government Republican ideology that existed since before Hoover. And Democrats' support for government intervention and affirmative action reflected their broader 20th century ideology as well.
FWIW, I happen to side with Democrats on this one, at least with respect to economic interventions. But the parties have more or less the positions you’d expect ideologically.
There is a good book that covers this: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133898/th.... It gives a similar but slightly more nuanced take than Pearlstein, which I don't think is wrong, just incomplete and a bit misleading.
1) Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964, winning no Republican states other than his own, proved that opposing the civil rights act of 1964 wasn’t tenable for either party. It’s not like Democrats could have beat Reagan had they opposed it. They would have lost their northern base, just as Goldwater lost the Republican base in 1964.
It’s one factor in the detachment of the south from the Democratic Party, but that detachment had been a long time coming due to economic changes.
2) By 1980, the debate shifted to affirmative action and quotas, where Republicans had a longstanding ideological basis for opposing government intervention.
https://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-souther...
(Similarly, I think you've collapsed the GOP of the 60s too far down; the Rockefeller Republicans were, on domestic policy, square in the middle of where the mainstream Democratic party is today. George Romney would have opposed AOC, but so does Gina Raimondo.)
At any rate, when people debate which is the "racist" party, they almost invariably ignore the fact that the US was a 4-party polity in the mid-century, not a 2-party polity. What's changed since then is that we have, from 1980 through today, sorted down to 2.
Goldwater offered a libertarian justification for allowing the south to continue segregation. And what did that get him? He flipped five Deep South states, at the expense of losing every traditionally Republican state Nixon had won in 1960, with the exception of Arizona. Goldwater lost stalwart Republican states in the Great Plains and Mountain West, like Colorado, that had voted against FDR three out of four times. Supporting segregation was a political loser for Republicans.
Nixon and Reagan did not "run the same strategy." Neither supported segregation. They didn't have to. Democrats, having abandoned their segregationist wing, sought far-reaching government programs and social engineering to remedy economic and social disparities, as Democrats are wont to do. Nixon and Reagan pushed back on those policies, entirely consistent with Republican ideology.
This article does a good job explaining what really happened: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-myth-of-the-racist-re...
> The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in the South because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (and non-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewhere in the country.
> Buckley used the pages of National Review to promote a ‘fusionism’ of sorts between paleo-conservatives, neo-conservatives, tea-party enthusiasts, the deeply religious, libertarians, social conservatives and free-marketeers.
Particularly since Trump, a lot of the base is now economically moderate or even liberal, but socially conservative. The social conservatives are the ones who are most worried about the social liberals having increased power over online media platforms.
Apart from that, the deregulatory conservatives don’t believe that criticizing some practice of private business means going further to impose government regulation. To them, there is a role for self regulation. And the social conservatives and traditional conservatives don’t care about using the power of government for perceived proper ends at all. They are quite mad, in fact, at the limited government conservatives for giving up so much ground on things like healthcare and unions over those issues.
Plus, certain behaviours are in the interests of specific businesses but damaging to free competition as a whole: monopolies, censorship, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3G7n21p0kY
Lenin after securing power, quickly killed off or imprisoned people in his own communist party that he deemed might pose him a threat. Sadly this included most of the well meaning people and idealists.
Hitchens narrates a great and chilling example of this:
Iraq's 1979 Fascist Coup, Narrated by Christopher Hitchens
You've been doing it a lot lately, and we ban that sort of account. I'm not going to ban you right now, because you've also been posting good comments. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this, we'd appreciate it.
Because there isn't a free market, but a regulated market and there is a widespread perception (on both the left and the right) that the regulations are tilted in favor of the establishment and oligarchs, and against normal people, workers, consumers, and taxpayers.
Furthermore when there was protests which were marred by violence in 2020 the platforms were supportive of the protestors and continued to permit them to organize.
> what is the rationale for squaring this circle
If we want a free market, lets have a free market. If we want regulations, lets let those regulations reflect perspectives from both sides of the aisle. A regulated market for me, and a free market for thee, is not acceptable.
Any rationalization is post-hoc, done in support of the pre-existing (and pre-determined) goal.
As such, because it's entirely post-hoc, this leads to moving the goalposts, and any respective adjustments in rationalizations.
The primary question one must ask, in these circumstances:
Is my counterpart arguing in good faith?
If the signs point to bad faith (e.g., telltale language, gaslighting or similar methods employed, etc), then rational argument is not their currency.
Edit: My only thought is if people feel these companies are viewed as too critical to be self moderating than maybe these do need anti monopoly action to foster competition in the area. I absolutely do NOT agree with giving them any special statuses which would do the exact opposite of fostering competition.
If you believe in free markets as the most efficient mode of production and the most liberal way of life you will be against anything that undermines the freedom of the markets, be it private monopolization or governmental subjugation.
The question hotly debated is whether the Cabal of Twitter, FB, Reddit, and the like are large enough to distort the playing field through the sheer gravity of their scale. If you agree that they are you have to agree they have undermined the free market, and markets need to be rescued.
In the similar vein - you can argue that the only valid use of violence is to stop unsanctioned use of violence. There is no contradiction in both supporting and opposing use of violence at the same time.
But I do find it strange that people seem to think you can attempt a coup of the worlds most powerful country and face virtually no consequence or blowback? As the Emerson quote goes “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
Actually wait, being upset is not something you need permission for.
Pure markets are impossible in these environments
"Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because "that’s not how the free market works" — implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of "free market principles."" -- Kevin Carson
There's a few ideologies / models going on here. Eg:
- A company is like a person, with all the rights of free expression and self governance. From that perspective, twitter and FB are free to have whatever systems of regulation (or be totally arbitrary and capricious). And its up to the market to replace twitter/FB.
- A monopolistic social media website is part of the public square. So facebook is more like the US federal government than it is like the burger shop down the road. As such, facebook/twitter should be held to the norms of a government, not the norms of a business. They should allow free speech by the participants in that space, in accordance with the laws of the land. The market should be free to work inside twitter/fb.
Both of these stories are internally consistent, and both stories are consistent with the broad ideas of "free speech" and "free markets".
Even with ultra-conservative circles, there has always been some unpopularity with the party line on economic issues. Free trade, education, etc.
but i think we are allowed to be upset and criticize it or call for boycotts and condemn them. that’s our free speech.
just like if twitter banned any support of lgbt rights i’m sure the left would cry and not just dismiss it as “corporations aren’t held to the first amendment”
imo free speech is a human right and corporations shouldn’t oppress it even if they legally can. just like they shouldn’t discriminate even if they legally could
> imo free speech is a human right and corporations shouldn’t oppress it even if they legally can. just like they shouldn’t discriminate even if they legally could
Private people and companies are under no obligation to offer their help and services to people who wish to use those services to organize killings or any other crimes. In fact, it's extremely common for businesses to have (and enforce) policies against such use of their products/services, since it's obviously not in their best interest to be viewed by the public as an accessory to crime.
The "stop the steal" and similar posts now being removed under the policy are intended for recruiting people to an upcoming armed escalation of last week's riot and invasion at the Capitol (using the false pretense of election fraud by Democrat officials). Their purpose is to capture or kill anyone standing in the way of their goal to overturn the election result, at some point before inauguration. This isn't conjecture; the posts and the commentary surrounding them have been out there for everyone to see. This was also noted by Twitter in their recent announcement on the suspension of the outgoing president's account.
1. Companies are legally free to ban anyone they want. (in fact i side with right of the christian baker refusing to make cakes for gay weddings)
2. Companies shouldn’t ban people for their political opinions or restrict them from expressing them. It’s evil and immoral and horrifying behavior, but not illegal. if they do it, i will call it out as horrific. just like i think the baker shouldn’t discriminate against gay weddings even though they should legally be able to.
Let's say I (or my company) hosted an online message board, and a thread was brought to my attention with messages like "We need to hunt down every last Democrat senator and put a bullet in their head!", with replies like "Amen! I'll bring my rifles" and "What time should we meet?".
You'd better believe I'd "oppress" such speech and ban the users, and you'd be severely hard-pressed to convince me that such a response is a human rights violation. Those messages, or whatever fabricated claims were used to justify the threats therein, don't constitute "political opinions" just because political parties and politicians are named. Likewise, outright false/fabricated claims that "the Democrats" fraudulently/secretly changed the result of the 2020 election are, in no way, "political opinions" -- rather, they are statements of (false) fact, meant to incite viewers to violence for the fabricator's gain.
For me to un-publish such posts from my web site cannot be considered discrimination against a political group; it's refusal to allow my servers to help conspirators commit a violent crime. If you want to brand something as "horrific" here, it should be the posts I described and not the take-downs.
My hoped-for solution isn't for the government to step in and fix the problem. ("There oughta be a law!") It's for the company to be replaced by competitors with new and better products. (Or for the company itself to improve under competitive pressure.)
You no longer hear Republicans talk about Medicare or Social Security privatization, Obamacare repeal, Dodd-Frank repeal, etc because they've moderated on the free market idealism.
"Free market" is theory, not reality. There are no 100% free markets, nor are there 100% controlled markets. The free market is an ideal that you strive towards in a capitalistic society.
Also, the question of "why are they allowed to be upset?" is pretty wild. Who are you to disallow someone getting upset about something?
I suspect other countries and their citizens wouldn’t want American corporate interference. Free market forces will certainly cut down these corporate influence to size.
That’s my prediction. We will have to wait and watch. Time will tell.
Because there's a clear government-enforced bias. Can you imagine the shitshow if they banned, let's say, black people?
Obvious lie. The current government is controlled by the group pushing the "stop the steal" propaganda. No reasonable person would believe Trump's own government is compelling Facebook to remove it.
> Can you imagine the shitshow if they banned, let's say, black people?
Sure... And what, pray tell, does that have to do with removing _posts_ containing calls to violence? How are those two things comparable?
Nevertheless, I'll indulge you: While businesses in the USA generally reserve the right to refuse to do business with whomever they please, Federal law (under the Civil Rights Act of 1964) prohibits discrimination in public businesses made on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Many states also have their own laws further limiting discrimination, though I'm not personally that aware of how these have been tested in regard to online services serving many states/countries.
Beyond what's required under law, companies can have whatever policies they wish (but will have to deal with public outrage for implementing policies as disgusting as the one given in your example).
I don’t know how to answer your question outside of anology. It’s possible to want one thing and not another.
That is not to say that censorship is evil on its face. Like taxes, it serves an important purpose especially in private discourse. HN would not be as it is without the tireless efforts at moderation and censorship in the name of pruning out low quality discourse. To disallow all voluntary content discrimination or censorship is to lose direction. However, the key distinction is that the vast majority of the censorship on HN is not backstopped by the threat of government censorship to comply. If the calls for censorship stopped at the private sector and did not threaten the intervention of the government if they did not get what they wanted then I would have absolutely no problem with these private companies silencing individuals in much the same way I have no problem with HN banning people.
I suspect somebody will chime in saying that the censorship is now totally voluntary because they have realized just how bad the consequences of their existing policies are with the riots in the capital. To that I say, have you ever seen Zuckerberg talk about free speech [1]? Just look at 4:50 or so. 5:20, is literally a total refutation of the current arguments. At every step along this path he has spoken in favor of free speech and fought the calls for them to censor Facebook. As far as I can tell he is a true believer in the principles of free speech. There is no doubt in my mind that if he truly believed that the government would not intervene that he would not only not censor, he would immediately revert to their policies as of a few years ago with respect to censorship.
Really this argument seems to come from people saying that the 1st Amendment only applies to the government, so private censorship is totally fine. True, but are you really following the spirit of the 1st Amendment if you threaten government censorship? If people really thought the government would not censor, then they would assign zero credibility to the threat and ignore it. That people truly consider the threat is an indication that they feel it might actually be acted upon.
Also, I am not saying that government censorship is bad in all cases. There are cases where unlimited free speech may not be worth the consequences. However, such rules should always be carefully considered and we should not turn a blind eye to the fact that we are, in fact, using the government to stamp down on speech. It is with great regret that we should make such decisions since we can find no other alternative and we should acknowledge that we have engaged in evil to fight an even greater one.
We have too few competitors to Facebook for the market to work right.
For one thing, your argument is reductionist. Just because Republicans complain about how CNN chooses to run its newsroom doesn’t mean they want a government takeover of CNN. You can say that something private actors are doing is bad or risky without there being an implication that the government should stop that bad behavior.
I mean you can flip this around just as easily? Where are all the Fairness Doctrine liberals?
For the other: quite a few Republicans, especially the folks Trump brought in, are economically quite liberal. See: https://ibb.co/mbTycKP Trump took changes to social security and Medicare off the table during his campaign. The laissez-faire economic libertarian wing long held the advantage within the coalition, but a bunch of them have become Democrats over the last couple of decades, especially with the rise of Trump.
It's not a free market when a handful of companies can collude to shut out a competitor as they've done to Parler.