"The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic- books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals."

While that's a nice quote and all, you are responding to someone talking about the story 1984 by George Orwell. Whereas your quote is from Farenheiht 451 by Ray Bradbury.

I'm not sure if you've actually ready the story or you just like the quote, but it's actually not about government censorship, it's about TV replacing books. Even a short Google search will help you out there.

Hi Roy,

Um, that was my point

slowhand09 spoke of this being Orwellian, but as you point and jf22 point out, these actions are done by private actors, not government

So read that Bradbury quote again, in the context of private companies burning books or deplatforming private citizen speech

"It didn't come from the Government down... Technology, mass exploitation and minority [referring to interests not races] pressure carried the trick"

Whichever one of the two is the biggest bully doesn't matter, in reality they can both act like Big Brother. I think CS Lewis' N.I.C.E from That Hideous Strength is more true to life than 1984.

I don't care whether it's a corporate or government logo on the boot stamping on my face.

What's the difference for the people?

Which people and what scenario?

At a base level comparing a government telling you which fictional truths to believe to a private company providing a technology service is difficult.

> private company providing a technology service

You mean "private company deciding what is right and wrong"?

Yes, a private company can decide people who wear orange shirts are wrong and ban access from people wearing orange shirts.

Can a private water company decide that people in orange shirts should not get water? Same here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25835408.

death threats != people in shirts

Who decides what is death threats and what isn't? Private corporations-monopolies?

When the private industry can censor the government, or outright purchase them, the difference is blurred

The 1984 comparisons are apt. We already see them unpersoning people and employing memory holes.

Nobody is censoring the government.

Why, sure they are.

They censored the president under phony pretenses. They've censored Senator Hawley's book. They censored other government officials from even uttering the name "Eric Ciaramella", even though he was certainly not a whistleblower and even if so, not legally entitled to such a level of privacy.

But to be more accurate, they're censoring non-liberals. This is evidenced by the fact that actual dictatorial regimes with many many violent deaths on their hands are allowed access to those avenues of communication without a fraction of the editorial control than was the President of the USA.

Other politicians, who have the "D" by their name (the government equivalent of a blue checkmark apparently) are allowed to spread hoaxes and lies for years and call for harassment and violence towards their political enemies, and big tech allows it to stand. Because they agree with it.

One only need to see the Googlers crying in the hallways after Hillary's defeat in 2016 to know why. They got their feelings hurt and vowed to never let it happen again, by any means necessary. And they are people with significant means to control what you may or may not say in the digital public square, if they don't simply decide to unperson you entirely.

The neoliberal Democrats and Silicon Valley seem to be in kind of in a lovers-gone-haters relationship though, it’s more complicated than what you’re suggesting. They were really loving each other in the Obama years, remember when social media was hailed in liberal media as a positive force for democracy (alluding to the various Spring revolutions)? I mean, Obama’s campaign used private Facebook data no less than Trump did, and liberal media even spun that as a good thing at that time! The problem is once that same technology was soon to be used against the neoliberals from both left/right wing populism (Occupy Wall Street and Bernie for the left, Trumpism for the right), that’s when their relationship got shakened quite a bit and now we’re up to the point where the Dems are filing antitrust regulations against Google. The neoliberals got a bit afraid that the new technocrats (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) would accumulate enough power to do whatever they want (against their interests, although so far big tech's interests just seemed to be about making as much money as possible with disregard for anything else), so liberal media began spewing out one of the most blatantly aggressive narratives that social media was the sole fault in the rise of Trumpism (well, only partially so, the more substantial reason has to do with US neoliberal policies leading to deindustrialization, along with the greater urban/rural inequality divide). I mean, SV companies have their faults, but it’s not just them responsible for this whole mess. Anyways, the mainstream Dems finally got the big social media companies to censor as they please, but that’s only after the populist left/right started to look for decentralized or encrypted alternatives, albeit slowly (Telegram/Signal/Mastodon/Pleroma/Lemmy/etc).

I think we're now there, given how close Big Tech and Democrats are, and have been, for a long time.

Private industry is clearly operating in the interests of "public" power.

The private industry made Biden president.

Maybe we need a new book called 2084 then

That won't be written for another 27 years.

What about private industry acting as a government, with similar power.

Again, private companies really need to remain smaller. The size of the companies are completely out of control. So do they have too much control? Of course.

With that said, they are only doing what they know the masses want. So in a way, they're just doing the people's bidding. If Google thought the majority wanted Parler and hate speech, they'd certainly have kept it up.

When I worked at Facebook, the wide-audience internal feeds were kind of dominated by very um.. progressive, enthusiastic messaging that I’d even call activism. And it was considered cool to participate and be in that.. well, ‘clique’ may not be exactly the word but it’s close.

I actually did think it was cool! However, if there were any right wing folks there, naturally they kept quiet.

Also, there are a huge number of conservatives and moderates using Facebook. The main point I’m trying to make is that it is misguided to believe that these companies do not have their very own conscience / worldview / quite strongly held political values.

Facebook literally tweaked algorithms to advantage right conservative websites. If the planned change would disadvantage them, the change was modified until they ended up on top.

Sure, but a 1984 comparison is not appropriate here.

Why not? Will you care who oppresses you?

This reply cannot possibly be a good faith addition to the discussion.

Accusing people of bad faith is against HN policy.

While true, fsflover has not made any statements and is only posting questions. He's "JAQing off" [0], so to speak. It's a hallmark of bad faith arguing.

[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

I honestly don't understand why the 1984 comparison is not appropriate here, because the book is about the oppression. I don't know how it's for you guys (that's why I asked), but for me it does not matter who oppresses me, government or corporations.

It most definitely is.