I disagree. Both are bad. When you grow to the size of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Removing content from your own platform allows you to spread propaganda that meets your own agenda. That allows these platforms to promote a politician that maybe trying to reduce corporate tax, and suppress one who is trying to raise it. It’s bad enough these platforms are dictating what’s a conspiracy theory or who we should listen to about Covid.
If Twitter becomes a propaganda machine deleting any tweet it disagrees with, I think that's shitty and if I had an account I'd delete it to avoid participating, but I'm not sold on why the government should make that illegal.
People and private organizations currently have the right to propagandize in the U.S. (without explicitly calling for violent uprisings, etc). What's the major difference between Twitter moderating tweets and a privately-owned forum moderating comments?
So that's the problem in this context. Twitter WAS being used to call for a violent uprising in the name of a blatantly false non-existent "genocide":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27773994
To repeat, a farmer rammed a tractor into a barricade causing the tractor to overturn and was killed. The whole thing was clearly caught on camera[1][2]. Within minutes there were blatantly false tweets flying around saying that police had fired on the farmers and there was a genocide in progress (with an associated hashtag). Twitter refused to take down such blatantly false and deliberately incendiary tweets.
1. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio...
The problem of applying censorship to counter fake news is that the same thing can be applied to counter legit news as well.
So such a precedent should never be set.
The messages are used to legitimize people armed with daggers and sickles and machetes belonging to sundry outfits pouring out onto the streets and indulging in arson, rioting, and murder. The situation is not hypothetical.
Twitter itself, of course, does not take that philosophical position.
I think that cannot justify it. There are lines that should not be crossed, no matter what.
Because if some kind of unrest gives you the justification to take some freedom away from the people, then nothing is preventing you from staging such an unrest, and proceeding to do exactly what you wanted.
> legitimize people armed with daggers and sickles and machetes belonging to sundry outfits pouring out onto the streets and indulging in arson, rioting, and murder.
Also can you give be some proof that this was happening?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Farmers'_Republic_Day_pro...
The agitating protestors vandalised a DTC bus and police vehicles. According to the police, the protestors used sticks, iron rods, pelted stones, while some Nihang protestors rode on horses fully equipped with deadly weapons like swords, kirpans and fursas and some protesters even used their tractors to run over the police. Some protesters driving their speeding tractors rammed barricades and attempted to mow down the policeman on duty
Another example, another city, another social media post: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Bangalore_riots
But you were saying the farmers where indulging in murder.
so do you have a number (and source for the same), for how many were murdered by the farmers, during this event?
I said no such thing.
They were reinstated.
Reach.
If I operate the world's biggest single-political-party discussion forum, is there a point where the forum is now legally compelled to host the other political party's opinions?
(To be clear: I'm not saying that example is exactly analogous to Twitter, but I don't understand why one would be legally different)
That's not quite what I said, but yes, kind of. No phone company is allowed to moderate the speech that goes over their network, for example.
As far as phone companies, my current understanding is that in the U.S., the government is involved in building and maintaining telecommunications infrastructure. Therefore it falls under the First Amendment.
If you run your own wires between a lot of houses to let people talk to each other, and then listen into every conversation and cut off ones you don't like, that doesn't seem illegal.
Things like Discord or Slack, for instance, should legally be able to moderate anything you send through them. Though it would be financial suicide to actually do so.
[Disclaimer here that I only have a vague understanding of telecommunications infrastructure]
Slack and Discord have self moderating. You can create your own discord or slack server and kick/ban whoever you want.
Reddit relies on self moderating your own sub-reddits. If it didn't then sub reddits like /r/sino prob wouldn't exist. But you have to go and search/find sub reddits or navigate from click-bait titles on the homepage.
This is unlike Twitter where it's all public, people you follow who like things are thrown in front of you, and all misinformation, propaganda, violence, insults, whatever is shoved down your throat, and the public cannot determine what should and should not be allowed on there, its up to a private company who is looking to 1) Profit, and 2) Protect its own agenda.
It would be nice if we had a balance of platforms, but unfortunately we have 1 for each medium. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube. Each of these have not 1 real competitor.
Social media platforms are content-neutral. They want to be treated like the "public square" because a lot of benefits come along with that. But then at the same time, they censor content that they disagree with. That's where it crosses the line. If Twitter came out tomorrow and declared that they are officially a left-wing social network and updated their rules to reflect that, then I'd have no problem with them kicking every Republican off the platform and banning every person who complained about taxes being too high. But Twitter won't do that.
I don't want to get further off on the tangent about telecommunications infrastructure, so I'll just leave that alone.
That being said, after having a political/ideological group I really liked removed off a major platform (that it followed the ToS of) without analogous opposite-side groups being removed, I'm at least very sympathetic to your position. I thing we both agree that harmless differences of opinion shouldn't be removed, but I'll agree to disagree on whether the law should be involved.
Well that's always the million-dollar question, isn't it? Take Twitter for instance. Whether there's an easy alternative to Twitter depends entirely on your reference class.
The social aspect makes this so much harder as people are unique. It's completely reasonable for someone to need to be on the same platform as some other particular person. Say, Elon Musk. Or pre-ban Trump if you want the least convenient example from a civics perspective. How do you justify kicking someone off a platform for having the wrong views if that's where their elected representatives spend most of their time?
But this perspective completely defangs your position in all but principle. Any privately-owned platform with important[1] people using it is basically any platform that has any reasonable amount of success. Even if you restrict to public officials, well, there's a lot of public officials.
[1] Note important is in the eye of the user, and people will generally self-select into platforms that have users that are important to themselves.
Just because some "famous" person uses a platform shouldn't mean the platform has to fall over itself to make sure their every word is hear and everyone can contact them.
Yes, such a point exists. If you have a monopoly, for instance, then you should be subject to very different considerations. If you possess a monopoly on a discussion/communication platform so massive that it has become very important to societal communication and reach, then your ability to do what you want in terms of censoring content, should be curtailed in the favor of promoting free speech rather than the opposite. Meaning even if the monopolist wants to pursue their own political agenda and censor speech, they are barred from doing so. That is the price a corporation should pay for owning such an important platform, their responsibility should be greater, their freedom of action should be restricted more. You may be allowed to sell ads in that important quasi-public square, however you should not be allowed to restrict human rights in the square.
It is said, frequently and incorrectly, that only the government has the ability to censor. That's not correct. A monopoly, well positioned, can accomplish an identical outcome: it can restrict your voice in very comprehensive ways, including up to the point of literally denying you access to the Internet.
And a group of monopolies that conspire together in pursuit of a political agenda, well it's just that much worse.
Facebook (taking into account Facebook core + Instagram + WhatsApp) has a social media monopoly position, or something very close to it. They shouldn't get the same regulatory consideration as a modest sized political forum with 5,000 members.
YouTube has a monopoly in its consumer-upload streaming video segment. It's drastically larger than its comparable peers. Vimeo (who is #2 or #3 these days? I have no idea) should not get the same treatment as YouTube.
Google has a monopoly over search. It should not get the same treatment as DuckDuckGo.
Amazon (as with Walmart), should not get the same regulatory treatment as Joe's little corner grocer.
Twitter for its part, clearly doesn't have such a monopoly, even though it does have a massive, potent platform.
AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile shouldn't be allowed to block your access to a phone account/number, and shouldn't be allowed to censor your calls. For exactly the same reason Facebook shouldn't be allowed to deplatform you.
I think it's very clear we're going that direction, there is no scenario where the biggest platforms escape being regulated in terms of their ability to censor and deplatform. If it has to be done at the state level to start, it will be.
I agree that if one company is the only feasible option - a true monopoly - there should be controls on their power.
However, I'm not convinced why any social media would fall under this umbrella at the moment. Facebook(& related) hardly have a stranglehold on the market, at least from the point of view of it being in competition with other social media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, etc. All of their products are slightly different, but generally are grouped under the same niche. If Facebook decided tomorrow that half of the political spectrum was completely barred from discussion, I assume people would just successfully migrate off Facebook (in a way they could not do if their government banned their opinion, or if the only place they could discuss on the internet banned their opinion).
Afaik phone numbers are a completely different discussion, as I believe the government is involved in creating and maintaining phone networks (placing it under the First Amendement).
You make a good point about something like YouTube, though. YouTube is the one on your list which most clearly has control over its market, so I could see the argument for oversight there.
This is a great comment, and definitely food for thought. I'll use this to examine my own beliefs — much appreciated.
Yes, see monopoly.
Why? See tragedy of the commons.
> If I operate the world's biggest single-political-party discussion forum, is there a point where the forum is now legally compelled to host the other political party's opinions?
The point in which you become monopolies that actively collude with other monopolies to shut down alternative platforms enabling discourse you disagree with politically is probably a good bar.
Then again, I think all censorship is immoral so basically there is no bar in my view on the matter.
> Yes, see monopoly.
It's not clear that a large platform is automatically a monopoly. For example, Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, and TikTok coexist.
Replace it with "Megacorp" and you have the same argument.
Why would the First Amendment's freedom of association change because a group is too large or loud in the public sphere?
Which is why one can have country clubs with, for example, racial exclusivity clauses. I'm not saying a like the idea of racial exclusivity policies. I'm only saying the First clearly grants private organizations a right to practice racial exclusivity.
That's a massive leap that isn't codified in law and the consequences of intermingling the two concepts has massive implications.
I don't think Twitter is to the size where it constitutes de facto government power (although Faceboot seems much closer). I'm just saying that asserting that anything that isn't the bona fide government cannot effectively oppress natural/human rights is a poor idea.
How do you encode "large enough" in the law? And are you suggesting Twitter is wielding power equivalent to that of a government?
I am pointing out that if we view freedom of speech/association as a natural/human right, it is possible for entiti(es) that are not the bona fide "government" to be oppressing that right.
This is trivially demonstrable by interpreting any existing society as an anarcho-capitalist paradise where there is no government, just one large company you're forced to contract with to obtain vital necessities.
For a real world example within our society, take a look at the list of songs censored by Clear Channel in the wake of September 11, 2001. There was no bona fide government edict declaring this, just opaque corporate power ultimately wielded by the same people marching us to war in most other forums.
There's a significant difference between private enterprise and government. For example, no matter how much a business doesn't like you, they can't jail you based on their own set of rules (laws).
If there are not other bars to go to, and if instead of bars we're talking about vital services such as food, housing, or communication that have been monopolized or oligopolized, then that assumption no longer holds.
I don't think Twitter itself is anywhere near that type of critical. But in general it's ignorant to write off "private enterprise" as if it something that is entirely distinct from "government". And this goes doubly in the US where "private enterprise" ends up shaping much of society.
If an argument about vital services is to be applied, I think it is much better applied to something more foundational to the internet, such as domain name registrars or ISPs.
If the only thing that you care about is the legal requirements, then you are abdicating your ability to criticize these laws in India as well.
You need to think beyond what is literally required or not required by law, and think about what the actual effect of a decision or policy is, regardless of who is enforcing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Herald_Publishing_Co._v....
It is pretty reasonable for conversations to have moderation, just as private groups can do in person, and as publications have editors.
It is not yet clear how social media fits into the platform/publisher/utility/whatever debate, but I'm just saying that we should be careful. Whatever we decide applies to Facebook/Twitter now will apply to some other company you or I create in the next decade.
1. "newspapers are economically finite enterprises" - There is a very real cost involved with printing newspapers, while the cost of hosting a social media post is so small it's not even worth mentioning.
2. "the exercise of editorial judgment is a protected First Amendment activity" - Everything that goes into a newspaper has to pass editorial review, meaning the newspaper controls and is responsible for what is published. Social media does not have that.
The editorial power of social media sites is kind of nebulous, I guess we'll have a court case that settles this at some point, but I'm not so sure it's clear now.
> I disagree. Both are bad. When you grow to the size of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Removing content from your own platform allows you to spread propaganda that meets your own agenda. That allows these platforms to promote a politician that maybe trying to reduce corporate tax, and suppress one who is trying to raise it. It’s bad enough these platforms are dictating what’s a conspiracy theory or who we should listen to about Covid.
Kinda sorta. There are actually two separate but related problems. It makes sense for private parties to be able to remove content on their own platforms, BUT that also becomes an issue if those platforms are able become as dominant "one stop shops" like Facebook or Google. So the real problem is figuring out how to break up the over-dominant platforms.
Corporation: can ban you from their social media platform.
It's not equivalent.
I think just about anyone who ran a vBulletin forum back in the day understands this at an emotional level.
https://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-karen-mcdougal-case...
Nobody, including Fox and Tucker Carlson himself, has claimed that Tucker Carlson Tonight is anything other than an opinion show. This is in contrast to CNN, where their opinion hosts actually do claim to be simply "reporting the news."
Where did you get that from? Completely untrue.
The new IT rules mandate the appointment of persons in certain executive roles, and companies, including Twitter, have the freedom to choose whomsoever they please, as long as he/she is an Indian resident - they don't have to be "government approved"
Twitter didn't want to have a responsible officer in India. The managing director of Twitter India said he was only responsible for "marketing" and did not have control over the day-to-day functioning of the company.
> controversial hash tag related to farmer protests
It wasn't just a controversial hashtag. A farmer sped a tractor into a barricade causing the tractor to overturn and was killed. The whole thing was clearly caught on camera[1][2]. Within minutes there were blatantly false tweets flying around saying that police had fired on the farmers and there was a genocide in progress (with an associated hashtag). Twitter refused to take down such blatantly false and deliberately incendiary tweets.
Edit:
1. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio...
As far as the "controversial hash tag", that was a quote directly from the article. I feel like removing an entire hashtag related to a political position is generally a bad idea and can silence a lot of legitimate free speech, but I don't know enough on the specifics of this situation to apply that here.
Thanks for adding more context to clear up some misconceptions.
Most governments (including India's) already have the power to make Twitter and other sites censor content. The requirement for a local compliance officer comes from the fact that Twitter's India branch has literally no direct control over the content on its platform and is mostly here to sell advertisements and look over marketing.
This course of action is primitive in western countries, but understandable in a country where the police to population ratio is around 100 times lower than in the west and only 2% of the working age population pays any taxes.
Self regulation as a course of action is a failure. Companies who want to “grow fast and break stuff” don’t care about riots in a country like India.
Dangers: Indians’ free speech will get trampled. Parties in power will enforce the law in a biased manner as they always have done.
This trade off is acceptable since western companies operating outside their home country only care about profit and don’t operate with any social conscience. It would be utterly foolish to outsource the fight for our rights to them. It is more preferable to have these companies operate within the boundaries of Indian law, no matter what they are.
Strongly disagree. This is how China does it: they won’t tell companies what exactly to censor, but the companies will be punished if they don’t censor what the government wants to be censored in retrospect. It is much worse than governments forcing censorship explicitly, because otherwise companies are led to guess at government intentions and will be very conservative in what speech they allow.
“Hey tech companies, can you censor that app or these views? We’re soon going to be discussing anti-trust, taxation, privacy, right to repair, gig economy, and other topics in this session of Congress but first let’s discuss what you’re doing about our political adversaries on your platforms.”
More on this topic: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-valley-in-a-sho... https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hea...
Frankly, you’d have a much better case if you pointed at politicians with much more power abusing their position (eg Trump or Biden), at least they have real influence on the DOD and DOJ. But even here, (recent) history has shown that this influence has very hard limits. Like Trump trying to punish Amazon by getting a cloud computing contract awarded to Microsoft, which was unwound this week due to undue influence playing a factor.
The problem is always with a small but powerful, adamant and ruthless minority that is ready to burn down the country to serve their interests.
Ultimately the elected government is the only true representative of the people.
Protests can be made to communicate your dissatisfaction and perhaps let the government know there is an alternate viewpoint.
However, the farmer protest was an orchestrated and violent bullying not only by those politically connected middlemen who want to maintain the status quo, but also a grand coalition of the corrupt, the compromised and enemies of India, including foreign actors.
But then in such a parallel universe, we would probably not need nuclear weapons or armies.
The problem here is that in the space of global propaganda, you want to disarm democratically elected representatives while heavily arming dictators & tyrants.
Mass propaganda should not be the monopoly of few corporations and dictators.
Ah so just like china?
>Now a wide range of foreign companies in China, from the cosmetics giant L’Oréal to Walt Disney and Dow Chemicals, all have party committees and display the hammer and sickle on their premises. In 2017, Reuters published an article that quoted executives from one European company saying that party representatives had demanded to be brought into the executive committee and have the business pay their expenses.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/china-business...
Wow. Quoted just so others don't miss this.
It was news to me.
The actions of these companies in these Authoritarian nations proves that despite many claiming otherwise
Well, unless Dow's local operations get seized ..
I think Lenin once said: The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
yep.
Lenin is the one that pioneered the hybrid authoritarian capitalist system that China is using right now too, so the feeling is very appropriate.
Think is this closer to the GDPR requiring the Data Protection Officer role. I don't it needs to be govt-approved. Not in favour of the overreach by the govt here, but it's not quite as bad as that. They want a single point of contact they can put pressure on.
You trust a government that's trying to censor content they don't like over a company that doesn't want to censor it?
2. The corporate structure of those companies is information that is available from sources other than the US government.
You have to realize that your government uses anti-American feelings to push their propaganda.
A lot of Indians trust Twitter more than Modi, especially non-Hindus.
Also I don’t think anyone has advocated that Twitter should break the law. But surely it’s fair game to discuss whether it’s a good one.
Please name one time censorship has had good outcomes that did not also lead to more censorship?
Because this time clearly doesn't count.
Legality, like all things to do with morality, is irrelevant. Legality is downstream from cultures, not morality.
E: The mere fact people are downvoting an anti censorship viewpoint is disturbing to me. Y'all are worse than Nazis and you don't even realize it.
> Yep lots, A democratically elected government of a state is at least answerable to its constituents who can boot them out if the government doesn't do the right thing. These monopolistic social 'platforms' are not answerable to anyone but the whims of their management and advertisers.
They purposely allow lies and misinformation to propogate as it boosts engagement and are a cesspool of disharmony and conflict.
Just as well that they'll be now held responsible for the results of their actions.
Love it, high time many of them are broken down for having far too much power.
How can constituents come to any informed opinion if a government appointed executive is summarily striking any public discussion on controversial topics? Seems completely antithetical to any semblance of a functional democracy.
Case in point, Indians might elect BJP for the central government but consistently have been booting them out at the state level for the past 3-4 years. BJP has actually lost power in multiple states since 2014.
Indian politics is way more nuanced than any discussion on an internet forum would ever allow for.
Blatantly trying to interfere with elections -> if you mean by spreading opinions / propaganda, this seems generally under the realm of free speech. The government being able to silence opinions that disagree with it generally seems much more problematic than civilians being able to spread bad opinions
Cause riots -> Again, I think opinions should be legal. However, saying "hey y'all let's get guns and actively participate in violence" is not protected under free speech in any country I'm aware of, but is also not really my major concern with this legislation.
The farmers protests were allegedly detrimental to the sovereignty and security of India and so it makes sense to ban those kinds of hastags.
FWIW, the American government also requests removals from social media sites.
Edit: perhaps this comment is unnecessarily controversial / inflammatory. I just wanted to suggest that there are other interpretations of free speech law and that it makes sense for a corporation to comply with those laws if they want to operate in those countries. I personally dont agree with those laws, which is why I fortunately moved to the US.
Thats a fairly nonsensical claim. Are you planning back it up with more details/sources?
Because if we are just making sentences on the fly, IMO, this BJP regime has been allegedly detrimental to the sovereignty and security of India.
Source: https://m.economictimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/govt-se...
And to give some context on this hash tag, I believe it came after the gov't put across barricades and barbed wires to caroll the protesters leading many to believe that the regime was planning a major crackdown. The situation in the first week of Feb was very tense.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/others/iron-spikes-bar...
Didn't the US also place barricades for Biden's inauguration?
I'm noticing a pattern here:
People, who deem it "good" that the US places barricades to corral protesters of the biden inauguration, are the same people inclined to deem it "bad" that India places barricades to corral protesters of the farm bills.
Similarly, people who deem it "good" that Twitter deplatforms #StopTheSteal are inclined to deem it "bad" that Twitter deplatforms #ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide
An accusation for which he was acquitted by the Supreme Court of India.
And Modi's actions/inactions pale in comparison to those of the Congress Party, who actually committed genocide against the Sikhs in 1984, which resulted in up to 17,000 Sikhs getting murdered by Congress goons, for which noone has been held accountable.
Wasn't it partly due to the genocide misinformation? One protestor died in a tractor accident and Twitter did little to curb the misinformation that he was shot by police.
Why? How does a hashtag impact a country's sovereignty or security?
Edit: am I missing /s here?
No, they don't. Any American Government official requesting a removal of anything from social media sites would probably lose their job. That's saying a lot because American Government officials rarely ever lose their jobs.
Amazon was pressured to stop hosting Wikileaks.
You missed FOSTA/SESTA then? That forced the removal of anything that even looks vaguely like sex work from social media.
An actual civil servant enjoys no such impunity from normal rules of conduct.
Your opponent was elaborating on the original claim that "If any American Government official requesting a removal of anything from social media sites would probably lose their job", then "AOC should also lose her job when she requested removal of Parler"
Your counter argument, "I'm sure AOC's demand was critical in their decision to ban such a vibrant, positive application" is an unfair redirection of what your opponent was asserting.
And a public plea for a company to take a certain course of action is different than a direct request. The latter carries much more "or else" subtext. An upset Congressperson doesn't carry the same potential for immediate disaster as having the DOJ on your back.
Twitter declined this time, but I have a hard time believing the Democrats had no hand in twitter blocking the Biden laptop story or removing Trump from the platform
Also, criticizing the government is not illegal according to Indian laws.
In this case, anyone with an eye.
Not saying it wasn't the simple explanation, but that video is not really evidence of anything either way.
The quality of evidence supporting the rumor that the person had been shot by the police was extremely sketchy and the evidence that is available points to the incident being an accident.
No, it doesn't. The tweets under that hashtag were spreading a false rumour that the police had shot at a farmer when there was a CCTV footage showing clearly that the said person had died in an accident caused by him running his tractor into a barricade.
I don't quite understand this need to quickly pass judgements on complex politics of a different country, without spending the minimum required time and effort to familiarize yourself with the topic.
I'm not sure that I personally am in favor. However, you're clearly right in that it's hardly unprecedented or unique.
The modern interpretation of the 1st amendment as being fairly absolute is only 50-100 years old. Don't forget the federal government had political prisoners for protesting against the US getting involved in WW 1, and the HUAC and McCarthy hearings were blatantly unconstitutional under modern jurisprudence.
We don't even need to talk about the Alien and Sedition acts, passed right after the 1st amendment was ratified!
The article makes this sound like a massive detriment to free speech. Companies removing content on their own platforms makes sense. However, governments being able to force the removal of content (such as a "controversial hash tag related to farmer protests against new agricultural reforms") can't be good. That plus forcing the company to hire government-approved executives seems like a slippery slope.
Are there any benefits to this regulation I'm overlooking?