And the first amendment is not a definition of freedom of speech. Read it again.

But for those of us under pandemic lockdown, all human contact outside the home is over private companies' platforms. Seems to me if you're banned from all the major private platforms that's de factor censorship, if not de jure government censorship.

More broadly, this also seems like a gigantic political victory for republicans: A few months ago the most high profile banned-on-all-major-platforms story was about Parler, a site that had literally been used to coordinate an attempt to overthrow democracy. Hardly an argument that a big 'cancel culture' exists or is running out of control!

Now, the most high-profile story is about a beloved children's author and famed anti-fascist getting banned? You couldn't ask for better evidence of a 'cancel culture' run amok.

In simple terms, is it a good idea to ban algebra if a vocal enough community of anti-algebra people convince ebay to not list it?

Is it OK for them to delist other things like spam and porn if enough people don't want to see them? If not, we're looking at a very different internet

If so, we can probably reason about the merits of delisting based on whether we feel algebra might be good and early twentieth century casual racism the rightsholders have disavowed might be bad (or at least, not so good eBay ought to feel compelled to incur reputational damage to continue to distribute it).

unlike adult content or spam, casual racism is an idea so important platforms ought not to impede its spread is an argument of course, just not a freedom of speech one.

I will open by saying that, from my perspective, in accordance with Sturgeon's law, 80% of books on Ebay and Amazon ARE spam and should be delisted for the well-being of general populace and positive feeling of accomplishment for busy-bodies, who seem to be running those operations. If we start removing spam, we better get the proper authorities ready to remove the superfluous, pointless and downright dangerous material that spam produces.

Still, is your standard 'did enough people complain'? If so, that is a bad standard, and most certainly not how internet was devised, or was intended to work.

I think the issue I have with 'casual rasism' in this book is that I do not see it, and yet my access to the book is limited, because sufficient amount of people whined. In short, I do not buy this argument.

But lets say I do, and we want to talk spreading bad ideas. US is ok with allowing Mein Kampf. How is it different? Why are those ideas ok to spread, but not that one? How is attempting to destroy an entire population less offensive than 'casual racism'? Do we have some sort of diagram that shows how victimhood is rated?

The answer is really simple. It is not better or worse. It is just an idea. And if 'casual racism' is an idea, then its spread is absofuckinglutely a freedom of speech issue. Just not one one can easily get behind, because it is, well, bad. But that does not mean you can just pretend it does not exist.

No, though obviously it is a factor. I'm pretty sure it's not eBay's standard either. The rights holders, who are extremely familiar with the content, took the view the books are too racist to continue selling; eBay could have chosen to argue the other side and profit from people buying second hand copies at absurd prices to own the libs, but I don't see any particular reason why it should. Frankly categorising spam is at least as prone to disagreement as categorising racism, and I don't think spam has worse consequences. It possible the Seuss Foundation and eBay are excessively prudish about some of the books and certainly eBay's moderation policies are inconsistently applied, but that doesn't imply a website adding a few books to the list of stuff it doesn't want to sell on the grounds of they're bad enough for the publisher to have unpublished is a particularly chilling violation of speech. The internet has been prudish for a long time, as anyone trying to use Big Tech to sell nudes knows, and I really don't see racism as a less sensitive subject than sex.

As for how the internet was imagined to work, I'm pretty sure it's expected to work in exactly the same way as things normally do in Western democracies: people and corporations are generally free to choose who they do business with and what they sell except in very specific circumstances where it is deemed harmful (like refusing to do business with a particular race, or using market power to squeeze a competitor, or being a public utility). It is possible to argue that racism is an intrinsically valuable idea which deserves this sort of special protection which other forms of speech don't, and it's also possible to argue that the risks of curtailing good ideas by restricting any kind of communication is so severe that major retail platforms should be treated like ISPs and not allowed to have any influence on what's distributed by their service at all. But one of those involves explicitly privileging racism and the other throws out the possibility of those platforms attempting even the most cursory moderation, and probably other stuff most people here endorse like centrally-administered spam filters and ad blocking services too. Beyond those arguments we're not discussing speech right principles, we're discussing the details of what's silly [not] to ban.

Some organizations decide [some] ads are too disgusting to host, others decide the same thing about [some] racism. I find the intersection of people on here who believe the former is fantastic and the latter is chilling quite strange. Frankly I'm more uncomfortable about racism than ads, and I use uBlock's list of undesirable content as much as everyone else here.

I do appreciate the civil reply and agree that moderation is not consistent though.

In US, the entire market is divvied up between various oligopolies. You can name an industry and you can usually find 3-4 dominant companies that drive the market. Ebay and Amazon have ridiculous market power and reach ( reinforced by Covid ), which effectively means that if book is not available on their virtual shelves, that book does not exist for the general population. Ergo, removal from Ebay equals removing of an idea from the 'marketplace of ideas'.

I am oversimplifying, but not by a lot.

If eBay was a tiny company, it would be nothing, but you cannot ignore the effects of scale and market dominance here.

It is similar to the smartphone world: if Google and Apple block you, in practice you are destroyed.

The kerfuffle is about values and whether moral people have power.

If as a society we allow companies, that are equal to (if not more powerful than) the government we elect, to pick and choose what parts of public discourse are acceptable or not, we have no one but ourselves to blame when this inevitably goes pear-shaped.

Like many other things in the past, what is legal right now may not be ethically and morally correct in the future.

You are correct that society as we know it does not cease to function immediately after the giants like amazon, facebook, twitter, ebay, etc. take a specific action like banning a book or banning a user. However, the longer term implications are far more concerning and the time to start contemplating these issues was yesterday (or any other time in the last few years). The next best time is now.

There's probably a useful discussion about whether orphaned works should be protected by copyright.

But it's madness to suggest that once a publisher has published a book they're somehow compelled to continue publishing that book in perpetuity.

I don't think(?) eBay globally banned selling of past copies of Meinkampf while the copyright was cleverly held by a German State. Doing so is pretending copyright is a right that extends to sold property that is a copy, extending a right too far, while banning a class of books like MeinKampf for your own reasons is perfectly valid.

If they want to ban racist children's media on their platform then they should. That includes a lot of TinTin, popeye, Tom and Jerry, etc, that has never been classified as racist by some copyright holder.

edit- s/published/printed

Of course, if you believe that copyright should prevent the resale of goods, that's an entirely different story that ignores the current state of affairs in the world and the legislated rights of people in many countries (where there are such laws that prohibit limiting the resale of goods).

Well, after WWII, the USA engaged in their "denazification" of Germany, where they censored and burned Nazi materials.

Which side would you say they were on?

https://www.amazon.com/If-Ran-Zoo-Classic-Seuss/dp/039480081...

This questionable book that Dr. Seuss Enterprises no longer wishes to publish can be at your front door tomorrow. Enjoy.

Relegating books to a market outside of the largest sellers basically amounts to erasing them. Sure, in this case people could still find them, because they are from a famous author. But what about unknown writers, with views that don't align with what is approved by the PC crowd?

For the record, I have never read a Dr. Seuss book and don't encourage racial stereotyping, but there are other edgy subjects (like the legalization of certain substances) that I can imagine becoming less fashionable at some point in time. I don't want to see books supporting this idea suppressed at some point in the future.

We should be very careful with this new self regulating market, that follows the loudest outcry to determine what they allow to be sold.

The government isn’t involved. Or should it be and it force you to sell everything?

There are surely going to be more voices advocating for removing racist stuff than those arguing to keep it. One side inherently has the advantage. So without the government getting involved, what exactly are y’all suggesting?

Obviously every free market is self regulating, but we never had this mixture of a limited selection in dominating online sellers and the amplifying effect the internet has on any kind of outcry.

The government has nothing to do with my argument. We don't need laws against this (yet), but we should keep an eye out for changes that will push counterculture underground. Dialogue beats suppression any day in my book.

We have more selection at our finger tips than any time in history. I guarantee if I wanted those books, I could find them without leaving my desk.

What we are seeing is not an inevitable consequence of capitalism and reducing it to a profit motive misses much of the picture. It may benefit eBay's bottom line, but there other other factors at play.

For example, the public expectations of private companies are changing, as more people want them to act as arbiters of morality. Similarly, corporations are increasingly adding social ideals to their objectives. While there is clearly a PR aspect at play, corporate leaders and shareholders can and do balance moral objectives against their bottom line.

I think what people are reacting to is the feeling that they are loosing control to corporations over the direction of social change. Just as individuals can feel disempowered in the face of corporate influence in political arena, individuals feel disempowered by corporate influence in field of morality and social change.

That is a massive non-sequitur. How do you even know what are the skin colors of individual people who defend the books? Are people of certain colors obliged to have the same values?

This is going to lead to reverse-dox revenge killings.

Dr. Seuss Enterprises stopped printing these books because they decided the books were insensitive and offensive. Should we force them to print more of these books?

If a dominant player (Amazon, Apple) blacklists you, it is not a drop of water, it is a devastating tsunami.

It is rational to concentrate on tsunamis and ignore mere drops.

They can stop printing. But it is hard for me to defend Amazon, Ebay, et al with 'they can do what they want on their platform'.

If your argument is that eBay and Amazon are so critical to the fabric of the internet that special rules must apply to them, I wholeheartedly disagree.

I do think, however, that the current situation is no longer acceptable. I don't know whether as a society we should consider some sort of limit on influence a given company has, but that is actually what is needed. If Ebay was a corner store, I would not give half a shit that it stopped carrying Seuss. When a publicly traded company does it, it quickly becomes problematic.

The freedom of a giant, monopolistic company is not aligned with the freedom of humans.

We already have precedents for conpanies being forced to impartiality- utilities. Ebay's a utility, the modern large-scale version of the ground a flea market sits on.

Yes, it is a form of censorship. It is completely legal. people can still have an opinion if HN should engage in censorship, and if the criteria are appropriate.

>Should we force them to print more of these books?

Of course not!

Flagging and moderation on HN is not censorship, because the content doesn't disappear. Am I the only one that browses HN with "showdead" enabled?

Similarly, I think that eBay's actions are paternalistic, heavy handed, and part of a trend I do not support. I would encourage others who feel this way to let ebay know.

A store should not have the freedom to determine what it sells?

The question above can be modified to make it reflect the current argument more accurately to: should HN censor all earlier posts and comments, based on the most recent changes in sensitivities?

Edit: question above, not yours

After Charlottesville, the AHA put out a statement making it clear that removing confederate statues from public view was absolutely not “erasing history”. Nobody listened to them. People just kept going on about the left erasing the past. This made it clear that this was just a culture war rather than honest concern.

If you are worried about erasing the past, get the opinion of some historians.

What worries me is the voluntary whitewashing and consequent suppression of alternative media by companies whose judgement is solely based on PR.

A publisher choosing not to reprint works that contain questionable content is completely understandable and well within their right. Nobody is arguing they have to print these books. But when the biggest open marketplaces begin to decide what is allowed for resale, that is something else entirely.

It's a slippery slope to let public outcry determine what is easily available and what is not.

Then why was that the entire content of your post?

> We all know history is written by the victors.

It isn't. All of the history professors I know cringe at this phrase.

How do you know this?

Maybe efforts in previous years made them do it now?

I don't know how often I've had to point this out, but the US constitution is irrelevant here. You might as well refer to your favourite monty python sketch for all I care.