From what I recall the 2016 election was frequently attributed to some vague accusation of hacking from Russia but the same standard was not applied at the time, nor is it applied today. The people espousing this view were eventually proven inconclusive in all the different inquiries into the matter, and they were far more influential than a man who sells pillows.
There seems to be a very disproportionate level of enforcement towards offenders on the social media platforms, and this seems to stem from the personal politics of the people working there.
If the employees at these companies had the opposite politics, I am quite sure the rhetoric around this issue would be framed in terms of authoritarianism. Are you not allowed to criticize your government anymore in the USA? I find that to be quite incredible.
To the European eye the idea of allowing any and all public utterance feels like a free ticket to disaster.
Deliberate and carefully crafted representation of "reality", and indirect communication via various "trusted channels" is part of winning elections anywhere.
The carefully and orchestrated use of mass media in the 1920s and 1930s, skillfully crafted to lead the electorate to certain political choices, was later used to even accept certain political atrocities (internment camps in the beginning, war and industrial mass murder later).
So to protect the electorate (!) from being grossly misled, many European countries in the aftermath of the 1940s decided to counterbalance the freedom of speech with rules what is not freedom of speech.
And yes, the details are tricky and courts have to decide.
Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable limits to free speech?
Here is a fairly straightforward example from the German penal code:
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
This is true. However, the part nobody wants to talk about is that it didn't just happen in Germany.
That's a very generous way of looking at it. In the West, I would say that it would be more accurate to look at it through the lens of the cold war, though. Communism and radicalism were to be prevented and so freedom of speech was necessarily curtailed. In the East, it was likewise curtailed, ostensibly to 'protect the youth' and 'prevent disinformation' but with more potential for immediate consequences.
>Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable limits to free speech?
Sure. It's been debated a lot, actually. Laws have changed significantly over the last hundred years, almost entirely to the expansion of free speech side.
Many Western democracies have laws like this, which would be incompatible with the American First Amendment, but which are basically intended to foster democratic health, and aren't particularly authoritarian.
The rules he was talking about though are more to do with the limitations on speech that can be considered insulting, transgressive or hateful. They also include constitutionality of political parties in general, disparaging the president, and many other things.
Dishonest claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 US federal election are a lot more dangerous, as is obvious from the Jan. 6th terrorist attack on the US Capitol.
Either of those precludes a good faith argument.
Twitter is only used by 22% of Americans as of 2019 [1]. If Twitter banned me I wouldn't even know about it for several months because that's about how frequently I log in. It's important to a certain kind of "very online" person but from my POV it's as inessential as Pinterest or Twitch.
I think that Twitter's perceived importance has been exaggerated beyond its actual user numbers because the previous US President used it so heavily. It was also an easy, cheap, reliable way for other publishers to churn out content. "Trump Tweets Something -- We React" was a daily staple for TV and written publications for 4 years. But 78% of Americans get along just fine without using Twitter itself.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/10/share-of-u-...
No, Twitter has a monopoly on people who use Twitter. If you decoupled the users from the technology (e.g., by way of some common protocol that allows human communication networks to span social media platforms), Twitter would probably vanish overnight (surely losing out to a competitor with an "edit" button).
> Twitter is only used by 22% of Americans as of 2019
In what world is it okay for one company to monopolize much of the communication of 22% of Americans? Especially since Twitter isn't some neatly isolated system, but rather its effects spill over into the outside world; consider how often traditional media cites Twitter (not only with respect to Trump's own Tweets) or even Twitter's role in BLM protests/riots and the Capitol Hill riot. Twitter's reach pretty clearly far exceeds its own user base.
Moreover, Twitter and other social media giants often act in concert, so it's not "just Twitter" or "just Facebook" that we need to be concerned about, but also these giants acting in their mutual interests.
Your recollection seems at odds with reality. There has been a Senate inquiry with conclusions at odd with your recollections. The Mueller report came to conclusions at odd with your recollections. A reminder: that report, while not indicting the president or his team in anything in particular, found what it considered incontrovertible evidence of Russian interference designed to favor the election of Trump. The Senate report came to the same conclusions, even more strongly stated.
As for your claim that the people espousing this view being "far more influential than a man who sells pillows", I think you'd need to establish a metric for "influential", since it is far from clear precisely what you mean.
Furthermore, the sense that some people had regarding Russian interference in the 2016 elections never resulted in violence or death (certainly not directly). Nobody claimed that the election had been "stolen" (that's a direct quote from a large number of people regarding the 2020 elections). There was just a sense of unease and disquiet that the election may not have been fair but the result was accepted anyway.
The standard for 2016 is therefore whether or not Russian interference occured, which two high level US government reports have confirmed took place.
In fact, this is exactly what was alleged in many court cases. These cases were not allowed to move forward, however, because of procedural issues, not the merits of the case (standing, mootness, and latches).
If it's true, where is this evidence? It hasn't been on Fox. It hasn't been on OAN. It hasn't been on Newsmax. What's been presented has been uniformly debunked in ways that I find completely convincing. If this is as big as it's claimed to be, you don't shut up just because a judge says you don't have standing.
I haven't found a statistical summary, but I've just surveyed the status of all the cases on several neutral sites (ABA, Ballotpedia and others). I don't see how it is possible to draw any conclusion other than a deeply incompetent legal team with no convincing evidence failed to get a single in-place ruling that supports their wild claims.
and ctrl+f "standing" = 16 results (6 cases).
Bowyer et al. v. Ducey et al.
Wood v. Raffensperger et al.
Pearson et al. v. Kemp et al.
Feehan et al. v. Wisconsin Elections Comm'n et al.
Texas v. Pennsylvania et al.
Gohmert et al. v. Pence
ctrl+f "laches"
Tyler Kistner et al. v. Steve Simon, et al.
Their recollection matches my recollection of events.
> There has been a Senate inquiry with conclusions at odd with your recollections.
The results of that inquiry weren't released until 2020.
> The Mueller report came to conclusions at odd with your recollections.
That report wasn't released until 2019.
That means there were at least three years of unverified allegations, swarming around - espcially prevalent on social media - sans ban hammers, censorship, etc., etc.
The 2020 election's fraud claims were thrown out by courts. They were entirely evidence-free. Even Lindsey Graham gave a concise speech on the night of 1/6 explaining precisely how false those fraud claims were.
The 2016 election involved Russia hacking the DNC and leaking their emails, which became a centerpiece of the election debate ("Hillary's emails!"). It also involved Trump publicly asking for Russia to leak the emails, and then (once elected) firing the head of the FBI and saying in an interview with Lester Holt it was because Comey was investigating any possible ties with Russia.
The response to 2016 was the Mueller investigation. The response to 2020 was an attempted insurrection. One of these is not like the other, and you're attempting to paint a false political logic behind how the two have been treated.
"Disrupted confirmation hearings" seems fairly different to me from "smashed windows and doors to gain entrance to the US Capitol while hundreds of people chanted "Hang Mike Pence!".
That doesn't fit the captiol protest very well. Sudden? Decisive? Exercise of force?
>That doesn't fit the captiol protest very well. Sudden? Decisive? Exercise of force?
Tell that to Brian Sicknick's[0] family.
Or did you miss the part where five people died and dozens were injured?
Or the smashed windows to force entry into the Capitol building, with some explicitly saying they were there to overturn the results of the election.
Let's see. A mob overpowers the assembled security without warning. That's sudden. Check.
An armed group stormed the Capitol, assaulted police and other folks, and by their own claims, wished to injure, take hostage and/or kill elected officials. Exercise of force. Check.
That same group did so, again based on their own claims, to overturn legally certified election results. Political motive. Check.
So please tell me, what doesn't fit the term "coup d'etat"? Or in this case, attempted coup d'etat?
Note that just because it didn't succeed doesn't change the facts or the intent.
If I walk into a bank and demand money, I'm still a bank robber even if I don't actually get any money. The analogy is fairly exact.
[0] https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/what-we-know-about-the-5-p...
As I said, I am not sure I buy that anyone with half a brain thought that a plan could work, but there seems to be some supporting evidence that something like this had been imagined by at the very least some of the people at the protest. How far into the Trump administration that might have gone, I don't know (or if went into it at all).
Had something like that happened, it would definitely have been a decisive, sudden show of force in politics.
Start before the election with attempts to suppress Democratic voting (I did not know this, but apparently mail-in ballots are known for leaning Democratic---"Red mirage and blue surge" or something.), then attack the legitimacy of the election, both in the legal system and in public statements (increasing the latter as the former failed), further make semi-covert calls for illegal actions on the part of various officials associated with the election, and finally call for and support a protest (specifically including the more extreme supporters) at an event that is largely a formality. Yes, I think the whole course of events satisfies the definition of a coup.
Not a competent one, of course. A competent coup would have called in National Guard or military forces to suppress the rioters and at the same time sequester the members of the House and Senate in an undisclosed location for their own protection. Then declare a national emergency, place National Guard or military forces in state capitols and large cities---at that point violence becomes inevitable and the coup self-sustaining. (This isn't exactly a genius mastermind plan; it's how it's done all over the world.)
That does require the cooperation of the military, which Mr. Trump never really had, though.
Some of us are still wondering, though, why there were only Capitol Police at the Capitol. It seems likely that had the protest been another group, significant riot control forces would have been in place.
The vote count being fraudulent, the idea that fellow citizens had stolen the election, wasn't an ongoing discussion in December 2015, January 2016, etc...
It's curious you think that people claiming Russia hacked the vote totals in 2016 were "far more influential" than the people who've been shouting "stop the steal" when only one of those groups of people convinced folks to march and riot to try to "take back" the election. The message against Trump after his election was "resistance," a message which accepts that Trump won the election, but sought to keep people engaged to try to minimize what he could do.
I challenge you to find those people you think were continually organizing events to get Trump's election overturned.
> 10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to protect free speech".
Look at how the conversations happened. They were in places like forums and forums were often around topics. I belonged to many forums on topics and the general conversation was around those (with some water cooler).
This is worthy of protecting. Just this week I ended up in a forum on a topic because I was trying to figure out how to repair something and there was discussion around people on it. Very valuable.
> Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech control.
These are general conversation channels with the exception of Reddit. They are also paired with targeted ads. They tend to be short form. In a forum I see all the things and navigate it. In Twitter/FB/etc I see what they put in front of me. They control the flow of information.
The platforms the conversations are happening on are shaping the conversations themselves. This cannot be discounted.
Maybe a better way of thinking about this is that “free speech” on the Internet is about decentralization of small communities even if many of those communities themselves skew authoritarian? If you are banned from a small private gathering, everyone’s practical speech rights remain in-tact. You aren’t banned from the larger system.
Of course, Usenet was mostly techies and there were no teams of data scientists optimizing for clicks.
Moderation isn't something that's changed. Forums and modern social media both moderate. They do it to varying degrees.
Social media moderation comes in multiple forms. First they will choose which posts people see in their feed. This is a form of moderation. It's easy to have topics and even people just not show up. What shows up is based around engagement and money.
There is also moderation about content. People can be labeled or removed from visibility.
Then there is banning where banning isn't on the topic but the whole system. And the systems are tied to other things (e.g., banning on FB impacts your Oculus ownership).
Old school forums were based on topics and were different systems. They were moderated, if they were, for that system. The moderation was typically around content you posted. They didn't control the flow or order you saw it in. It was the content.
When banning came up, it was just for that form. So, if someone is banned from a jeep owners forum they are just fine interacting in a forum on web design.
I say this to note that the way the technology is developed has an impact on the way people act.
For example, these days there are people who don't want to speak out on some topics because they are fearful they will be banned or negatively impacted globally.
I'm not suggesting how the technology should be built. I'm trying to point out how the system design impacts the way people think and behave. Older systems were designed differently and had a different impact. It's worth noting these things.
The shift in screen size is an interesting one. The technology influences the content and even the way we think. It's not a passive element.
I think that was basically right, and now social media is rediscovering the other things that made TV work, which is that you can't just continually show the most upsetting/titillating media 24/7.
And with the benefit of hindsight, I don't believe Twitter/Facebook have the obligation to be the venue where we exercise our freedom of speech. They tried and it turned out they were very bad at it.
It's time to move on and use those services for keeping in touch with old classmates or whatever they are good at and develop platforms that are good for holding serious conversations.
The challenge is, there's no money in that. The money is in serving ads, which depends on serving up upsetting/titillating media 24/7.
Paywalls can't work because the barrier to entry keeps you from getting a sufficient network effect. You can have a small community that way, but you can't do a global "connecting everyone" thing. Such services will simply be outcompeted by the Facebook model.
I think the headlining article's point on open protocols might be the only way to square that circle and I'm not even very optimistic about that working. I think the real disjunction happens when we merge news with a general social feed of every random person's opinion. If you stream your facts and porthole into the broader world through the same framework that you stream advertizing and deranged soapbox rants, then you're conceptually putting all those things in the same box and blurring the lines between them. News articles present themselves more like ads (e.g.". . .and you won't believe what happens next"). Conversations start to resemble ads too, with people throwing out provocative statements to get attention and likes instead of engaging in a more genuine/1to1 way.And the ads start to try looking like news or advice from a 'friend' (read: influencer) to slip past your "this is marketing BS" filter.
The context collapse is what's unsustainable. In the olden days, when forums ruled the web, people got links and memes shared in forums, but the people sharing those things were getting them from other forums or they were finding them in blogs or pages via an RSS reader or just a daily roll of bookmarked sites they would go through. This maintained some cognitive difference between when you're seeing a blog written by an irascible and opinionated shock jock versus a piece in The NYTimes. Even if the person sharing had the point of an article go over their heads or ends up 'eating the onion' on something whatever harebrained aspect of it remains sequestered in whatever subforum they're in if it doesn't get fact checked there. The collapse makes the consumer stop being aware of the distinctions, and it cuts off the small-scale testbeds these things have to go through before they go truly viral. It also drives the producers to not care. So now the NYTimes hires irascible shock jocks as editorial columnists too because nothing matters anymore.
But they already have a giant global community. They now need to sustain it, that's a very different task and one better served by moderation. They are already being out-competed on how extreme a community can be by the various newcomers.
They are the incumbent now, with the incumbent's advantages. What remains to be seen is if they will move to take on the incumbent's responsibilities (which they have done here and there, and seem to be doing more of) or if they'll shirk it (which they did for far too long). In the long term they will make more money in a world that isn't on fire.
It's been a long time since there were three TV channels but ABC, NBC, and CBS all exist and even still broadcast their programming for anyone with an antenna. Between then and now their growth slowed, they tried different ventures, they were fused into sprawling media conglomerates, all things that are probably coming for Facebook and Twitter.
But these places almost all had "speech control". The exceptions were (in)famous.
It was decentralized, which has a lot of benefits compared to having fewer, huge platforms, but the control existed and was essential.
The "don't let platforms moderate anything but illegal content" argument is extremely disingenous. That's not how you get back to the "good old days" - or how you keep current smaller places like HN alive.
If there are problems created specifically by the big platforms being too big, target their size specifically. Regulating advertising and privacy and data tracking might be one way to start, reduce the incentive and rewards for being huge; but I think more likely, you'd want specific taxes, fees, or actions, based on userbase size.
We, anyone who knows what an article titled "Protocols, Not Platforms" is probably about... our discussions have failed to have enough impact outside of niche. People see there is a problem. "Marketplace of ideas" is somewhat of a hard sell . As you say... mismanaged cesspits, but also monopolies. Also, "marketplace" is more euphemism than metaphor when referring to a handful of click-optimizing algorithms.
I'm on the fence, but don't tend to think whatever the current politics does give more power to those companies who fucked up the system in the first place.
Facebook and Twitter were already in an uncanny valley of free speech. It has been, Free speech at their discretion all along, and this wasn't a theoretical problem. At least now it is clear what we are looking at.
In any case, this post in on point. It's disheartening that decades into this discussion we have not had enough impact that politicians even know what the hell we are talking about. Twitter doesn't need to be regulated. It just needs to die. Twitter does not need to be a company. It's already basically a protocol. Free the protocol. Discard the company. They are not needed.
Governments have no idea how to tackle the problems, so it's either private corporations that directly host these communities do it or nobody does. And that means going more years with a growing population that is getting radicalized by the above false information.
You mean that in the current framework right? Because in the proposed framework in the article more speech does not lead to more power to the companies.
> Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech control.
...In other words people are completely taking all the amazing things we have today for granted.
Very few things are an unalloyed good.
Your someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet counter is that, no, it is half empty? Thanks for the contribution.
If there is a failing, it is that Facebook is still claiming the moral high ground while they have ground our public discourse in to the manure.
What they need to realize is that once you give Tyrannical Control over to your leaders (governments, or BigTech censors), because you consider them benevolent today, it's foolish because they won't be benevolent forever.
Our founding fathers knew power corrupts, but today's 20-somethings seem quite unaware. They think we can create a system where all forms of "bad" speech are stopped. But the problem with that is you end up having to define "bad". My definition of "patriotic speech" might be your definition of "mean speech", so unless you appoint power-wielding dictators to make the final decision, the only solution is to just say everyone is free. Once you allow dictators they'll always become corrupt and self-interested.
The left thinks they're in a war against evil and meanies, but really the only opponent they're fighting is freedom itself.
The government has to be able to actively respond to the problems of the moment, and those problems will constantly change. A handcuffed government only benefits the already-powerful.
The dirty secrets of the "but the founding fathers!" argument are that (a) they knew they weren't creating a perfect set of rules in the Constitution, and planned for us to be modifying it as we learned new things and the world changes, and (b) it's failed anyway. Abstract principles listed on a page don't "protect freedom," bad actors can find ways to sneak things through (sometimes in plain sight, like that whole slavery thing that took a century to get figured out, or the followup forms of discrimination that are still with us).
There's no weakness in challenging the storybook fable-ized versions of history.
I think the biggest "story-telling" that's going on lately is in our schools by our socialist educators.
This isn't even remotely a representative sentiment of the 70+ million people that are not on the "left".
>>"The left" is for democracy>>
Again, I don't think we would find this accurate if data were collected. Both sides are "for democracy". I think what you would find is something slightly more refined: that one side appreciates that democracy alone is flawed and requires a strong constitution to guard against its propensity to oppress individuals. The other side finds a constitution that limits democracy too constraining.
Probably not, but it’s a pretty accurate summary of their leadership.
The facts are the 45 and the Republicans attempted to throw out the results of an election.
You can argue that most people on the right do not agree with this, but they should really stop voting for these people then.
Do you mean that 45 Republicans voted against ratifying the electoral college votes? My understanding is that that vote is largely procedural and that the losing side voting against it as a protest is common in every election. If you take away that context it makes for a great narrative in this election (the whole histrionic overthrow theme), but context often matters.
My understanding could be wrong, though. I couldn't quickly put my hands on the historical voting record. Or maybe that's not what you're referring to.
No. The only times prior to 2021 that an objection in proper form to trigger a debate and vote on any state’s submitted electoral votes since the modern process was adopted in 1887 were in 2005 and 1969 (the latter over a faithless elector), both addressing only a single state, and the 2005 example was explicitly stated to be an effort to draw attention to electoral system issues rather than alter the outcome; there weren't members who voted for it stating on national TV the expectation that who would be President was in doubt based on the action the way, e.g., Sen. Hawley did in regard to the challenges this month.
Voting against result certification is occasionally used as a protest against certain specific irregularities. It is absolutely not common to vote against them, and not in these numbers (i.e. not as a lone congressperson or two drawing attention to something they see as a problem).
[ EDIT: added known historical examples ]
Specific examples: 2016, 11 Democrats rose to object to certifying Trump's results; none of them had obtained a Senator's cosignature and so all were dismissed immediately. Objections were based on reports of Russian interference, subsequently confirmed in the broadest sense by the Mueller and Senate reports, though their findings would not have likely invalidated any actual results.
2004: 1 Senator and 1 Representative raised objections to results favoring Bush from a single state. They both stressed that their objections were not intended to change the outcome of that election.
2001: on the order of 15 Representatives raised objections to the Gore/Bush result, which had been decided by the SCOTUS. No Senator joined them, and Gore himself dropped the Gavel on their protest.
>the losing side voting against it as a protest is common in every election.
Really? That would be news to me. Do you have a source for that?
It's impossible to criticize bad ideas without some shorthand label for those kinds of thinking and ideologies. The fact that whole entire groups hold those same ideas necessarily is a critique of the entire group, and is necessarily tribal. But labels are nonetheless also necessary for the discussion to take place.
Democracies can only thrive when there's an educated population free to discuss all ideas, and allowed to strongly criticize or even ridicule those they disagree with. Yet people like Jack Dorsey think it's their duty to step in as a referee to make sure everyone's polite and behaves according to his personal political views. He needs to be put back in his place, because no one elected him, and he just fell backwards by accident into a power position over millions by pure luck.
Also while that may be true of individuals (I don't think it is), it clearly isn't true of party leadership.
Are you serious?
The fact that some cops eventually decided that 20 cops could not stand against 1000 violent protestors smashing through windows and doors, after at least one cop had been dragged out of his position and beaten senseless by the mob, and another cop killed, and so decided that the safest thing to do was open the doors, doesn't mean that all of a sudden they were peaceful protestors. Give me a fucking break.
They killed a Police Officer, chanted "Hang Pence", and tried to stop the democratic process of verifying votes for the new president.
Now of course you will likely argue that they were a small minority, but I don't see you making that concession for those on the "other side" so I'm not sure how much weight it'll have.
"The entire summer long while buildings burned, and entire cities looted by violent murdering thugs..."
Could you provide some evidence for "entire cities looted by violent murdering thugs"?
I still can't find any actual evidence of "violent murdering thugs" "looting entire cities".
Also I think you're being unfair by ignoring the causes of both of the protests, as (IMO, feel free to disagree) one of them was directly supporting democratic and liberal interests and the other was directly against them. I don't think you can discuss the protests without taking into account what they were protesting.
10 or 15 years ago people looked at web 1.0, saw many good communities and valuable conversations and said "we need to protect free speech".
Today people looks at Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit, see mismanaged cesspools and declare that we need centralized speech control.
This is understandable, but highly reactionary and irrational. Speech control is facilitated by big tech at their own discretion. Advocating for more of it means you're advocating for giving more power to the companies who fucked up the system in the first place.