Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah, and perhaps the solution isn't in demanding private companies to be your regulators and defenders of good morals and truth. What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries?

Consumers aren't rational. Neither are their demands.

I'm probably no more rational than anyone else, but I'm honest that I sure as hell don't want to give money to a service that is happy to host some violent folks content / garbage...

Please, speak for yourself. I think these companies should host absolutely everything[0]. Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open.

Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.

Were they really though? I'm pretty sure there were plenty of things, especially things deemed to be "Intellectual Property violating", which were strictly banned on all these platforms far before 2010. One example is that Google has been removing search results for as long as I can remember.

In other words, what was in your perspective "free and open" was very restrictive and politically pro-corporate from my perspective --- hardly an "objective stance" but instead a very political stance on what was permitted and what was forbidden.

If Drive was that permissive, then upload sites that tended to "look the other way", like Rapidshare, MegaUpload, etc, would never have existed.

It may have always been against their terms of service, but that didn’t stop it from happening in the beginning.

Source: first-hand experience

Edit: I checked dates. Google Drive started 2012. MegaUpload started 2005.

Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars?

I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. That doesn't mean other companies can't host that data, simply that I don't want any of my dollars to go to those companies.

If the vast majority of consumers also don't want to give money to companies that host that content, that's the hosting company's problem. The free market is speaking. Nobody is making it illegal for that data to be hosted, but nobody is obliged to pay for it to be hosted. So it seems to me that things are working as intended.

For instance, in the not-so-distant past many Americans found interracial marriage morally abhorrent. Wikipedia says only 5% of Americans thought interracial marriage should be legal in the 1950s. In today’s environment, that leads to deplatforming those who would’ve supported marriage equality. This is not something we would desire.

People are full of prejudices. I’m sure our grandchildren will look back in horror at ours. Let’s not deplatform them for that.

Your evidence with regards to interracial marriages does not support your point. Whether "something can be discussed" is an entirely different question than than "do you support position X". The very fact that they were able to take a poll is strong evidence that talking about it was not verboten.

What

The idea that algorithms are "neutral" is laughable. There is a loosely organized group of activists out there who are aware of how these algorithms work and actively manipulate them.

"Engagement metrics" are nothing more than these people pushing the buttons.

So why do tech companies cling to this line of being neutral when no one really seems to accept it and they themselves have no intention of being neutral? I feel like there wouldn't be any conflict about policies or complaints they have to deal with if they were more honest. Maybe it has to do with section 230. I don't know but I feel like we would be better off if consumers had more information.

If your view is based on provable falsehoods, your view is worse than valueless.

Tolerating these people is harmful to everyone, but that is not why Google is banning it. It is because it is harmful to Google's bottom line.

At the end of the day, Google owns their servers and can say what is allowed and what is not.

Well that's the problem in a nutshell. It ain't good for our society.

Republicans fought to make companies people, and to be not regulated. And now are crying when it fired back, because forcing a company to publish or block something is actually stepping on its first amendment right.

You won't really have such platform, unless it is done through a well established non-profit or through government (as long as government is Democratic and checks and balances work correctly).

People act like being banned is a life threatening event.

In that free public conversation is centrally crucial to the sanity of our society.

And having that public conversation controlled by a profit-seeking entity is definitely detrimental to that conversation. And thus detrimental to the sanity of our society.

And an insane society is obviously all kinds of threatening.

If they ban you, they are telling you that they don't want you on their private property.

They don't take away your internet connection.

When did society need Google, or Twitter, or FB to function? They do not. Those are simply three websites. There are literally millions more.

If this site banned me, I lost literally nothing. If Google Drive banned me(assuming I have an account, which I do not) I lost literally nothing. Same for FB. Same for Twitter.

They are not required for a functional society.

Why is that so hard to understand?

Because the public conversation requires a public. Right?

They stop you from using their services, that is it.

You have no right to access popular private servers.

You have no right to a conversation because everyone else has the right to ignore you if they so choose.

Again, private companies can not be forced to give you server space. That pesky first amendment thing and all.

Show me where you have the right to have a conversation. That means that others can be compelled to talk to you.

If their service is popular, then the public conversation is to that degree affected. Clearly.

The top performers on FB are conservative pages for crying out loud!

They are afraid of much, which is the problem. It is irrational fear and based on ignorance and hatred.

Parler earned their ban 1000 times over. When sites get shut down by their hosts because its users were openly inciting violence that is not a problem.

I have yet to see someone get booted for following the platform's rules and merely being conservative. People from all over the political spectrum get banned every day.

*By good, I simply mean thoughtful, high quality, factual, educational, or otherwise uplifting content regardless of politics

Algorithms don't discriminate "content" by it's actual content: they keyword match and look for clicks, and build a pretty perfect radicalization pathway more easily then they build a discourse [1].

You have probably experienced this: almost everyone has the experience of wanting to see some particular YouTube video, but opened it in an Incognito tab (or just avoided it) explicitly because they know the topic will prime the YouTube homepage to fill with nothing but things you don't want to see.

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/youtube-fa...

But then I remember that the best thinkers the world has ever seen (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, ad nauseum) were never able to look beyond their noses to see the human suffering of others.

Aka, they were perfectly happy to have a society run by slaves, to ignore the plight of the poor and sick, etc.

Worth noting that there were very influential thinkers and entire schools of thought that looked beyond their noses. A good example are cynics/Diogenes the Dog, who may well have been more influential than the Platonic line. E.g. (as per anecdotes we have left) Alexander the Great had great respect to Diogenes, who totally ridiculed Alexander's (and Plato's) position.

Also stoics (e.g. Marcus Aurelius) are quite direct descendants of cynics and not ashamed of this at all.

More I look into classical philosophy, or the "myth" of academia, more it seems that it's mostly a fabrication of perhaps scholastics.

I'm curious what you mean by being a fabrication? Their ideas were real and they've shaped history throughout time one way or another

I don't think it makes the content itself any worse, but it's difficult to know what was really historical.

I don't formally study this, but such problems become quite apparent when I try to e.g. find out historical sources for some philosophical statements or anecdotes. Probably not that different from how people attribute all sorts of "smart stuff" to Einstein.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudepigrapha

Edit: by "scholastic fabrication" I mean that scholastics spent a lot of time "interpreting" especially Aristotle (and tried to make it compatible with the Bible). I'm guessing a lot of what we think is "greek philosophy" may be from these interpretations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism

History is god damn hard. That's why it's useful to read the source material whenever possible.

I don't know how many times I've seen The Parable Of the Cave being used, but reading The Republic, really makes you understand what Plato meant with that story.

It's hard for most people to read that stuff though. I've only scratches the surface. It's easier to trust others to donor for us and distill the information.

And in each century, the lessons learned from the same material may be different too.

For most things it probably doesn't matter that much. For example classical philosophy (or its common translations/interpretations) provides a sort of "shared language" for academia, regardless of how historical it is. That's why I tend to think it more as a myth unless there's something specifically historically intetesting.

Most of the classical stories, e.g. the Cave, have "transcended" the original context anyway, and are in a sense richer nowadays.

But that's an obvious one. What else will be seen as "barbaric" that we don't even think of challenging?

Working 8 hours a day? Having kids? Going outside or staying inside?

I remember the Greeks were not big on private property and instead took great pride in their public buildings. The polar opposite of our society now

Then you first have to make something other than private property the backbone of average peoples' pension funds.

I don't have ideas, you?

Could you point to some readings if you're aware of it? I'd love to know

"Then again, the Stoics were famous for challenging common conceptions, and the founder of the school, Zeno of Citium, had declared slavery an evil in his Republic"

It's important to note that Ceneca and the famous stoics (Marcus Aurelius for example) were rich and benefitted greatly from the status quo.

In the historical environment it led to people being killed by the neighborhood mob when they decided to lynch the black man[1]

In todays environment it leads to genocide[2].

It is morally laughable to compare deplatforming to the consequences of the free spread of misinformation, propaganda and hate rhetoric.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States#...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

Vast majority of the consumers probably make pragmatic rather than idealistic consumption choices. Eg when you source a new iPhone, you source certain unethical labor practices. When you make use of the US dollar, you make use of some amount of atrocities that built its international purchasing power (eg any of the petrodollar wars). I bet those rarely bother even the most so-called “idealistic” consumers because a) it is a hard calculus to compute b) it is impossible to live when every “impure” thing is removed from use.

The difference with public content hosting is being able to twist arms to make them take down stuff and conform to an image of virtuousness which we narcissistically and psuedo-religiously identify with. It is not about the real damage the contents pose, it is our intolerance to being seen as a “person who can use such sites”. The threat is to our confirmation bias, in this case the confirmation of an idea that there is a clear right and wrong and we are definitely right.

If the majority of people believe that images of virtuousness are what they want, then that's just what they want. People aren't computing the outcome, their ethics are based on appearances and always have been. The internet doesn't change that fact. Whether it was in the middle ages or the post-industrial period or today, virtue has always been performative. So I don't really see what you think your argument demonstrates.

The enlightenment concept of free speech is likely a minority viewpoint among the people of the world. However I also think it is the correct view and that corporations or governments looking to censor speech are infringing on human rights, and believe in fighting for it the same as I would fight against racism, slavery, religious discrimination, authoritarianism, and so on. Just because a lot of people believe something is ok does not make it right.

What’s the difference between a real car and a perfect cardboard replica? One has functionality and interiority. The other is just exteriority.

In the King Midas story, he wants everything to be mindlessly golden and thus turns them into unusable shiny crap. He got the golden exterior alright, with none of the real goldenness, goodness they would afford him.

But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”. The young people of today are no less virtuous than their elders, despite the fact that their elders (like virtually every generation before them) complain that they are immoral.

It's an actor "performing" as a character for a few hours, and then reverting back to their original personality.

> But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”.

No, strictly speaking you don't have to define anything. Whatever virtue is, it's consistently that. "Performative virtue" is inconsistent, often hypocritical, and therefore inauthentic.

> The young people of today are no less virtuous than their elders...

I can't speak to virtue in general, but with regards to duplicity it does seem like there's increasingly more of it:

1) young people still have access to whatever methods of duplicity old generations had, and can additionally virtue signal on social media on an unprecedented scale.

2) it seems like it's simply becoming acceptable to lie. Politicians will directly contradict their own video evidence, multiple times a day, and everyone shrugs and moves on. We've given up on norms of discourse and civility. To be clear, I'm not surprised that lies are being told; I'm surprised that there appears to be zero interest or any repercussions.

3) objective truth itself is under attack. It's becoming normalized that anyone can say whatever they feel at that moment and that they have "their truth" and I have "my truth". This is incredibly dangerous.

That's exactly the point. It is contrasting the appearance of the thing vs the structural & functional organization (logos) of the thing. Without the second, it is not the thing. One cannot establish an identity relationship just based on appearances. That is why you can't equivocate the appearance of a virtue with being virtuous.

> It sounds almost like you are saying something but you never explain exactly what’s wrong with performative virtue.

"Performative" virtue, a more accurate designation would be "demonstrative virtue", is an oxymoron. You cannot be virtuous without conforming to the structural & functional organization of the thing, i.e. without really being virtuous. Real virtue is a participatory endeavor. A display of virtuosity is like the cardboard car, it doesn't function as a virtue. Making people take down content for narcissistic reasons does not make the world a better place, because it is devoid of at least two core properties that is rationality and proportionality.

> But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”.

This topic is systematically discussed since Aristotle, and you would appreciate the absurdity of trying to give an exhaustive definition in this forum. But I've given you two properties of it that narcissistic censoring violates.

Build your own data center and upload anything you want. Don't demand that a private company give you an unfettered soapbox.

Also "source a new iPhone"? Can we dispense with the meaningless buzzwords, please?

Can you pinpoint the moral difference between "Google should be allowed to refuse to host content that they dislike" and "Restaurants should be allowed to refuse to serve ethnicities that they dislike"?

It is a feature of free markets that consumers choose where to spend their money; but it is also a feature of liberal societies that the law precludes the majority from driving out an unpopular minority by refusing to do business with them.

Isn't that a sign of a moral panic? Back in the 90s, my parents didn't want to patronize companies that signed deals with pornographers. Even though I was only 10, that sounded ridiculous. Good luck finding any large company that doesn't.

While they don’t host porn, they do host a host of porn performers.

If Google and Apple ban you from their products and platforms, and Visa shuts down your payment processing, there is nowhere to go. You're done. This and much more has happened many times.

You're making the "just build your own internet bro" argument.

They could also accept checks via the mail. Or cash via the mail. Or cryptocurrencies. Or gift cards. Or barter. There are multiple options available to them.

The only thing you mention there that is a serious alternative are cryptocurrencies. And those are constanly fluctuating, needing very complex hedging against sudden value changes. And still something that most consumers will really struggle with. Most will not have a clue how to obtain crypto or how to deal with it (safely).

It might work for a really highly educated niche, but not for 99% of consumers. They just want to put in their paypal or credit card details and click buy now.

I don't need them to do anything at all.

There are competitors to Visa.

I can do anything I want without Apple, Visa, Google and even Amazon and Microsoft.

Really? How can you even know which services or products depend in some way on GCP, Azure, or AWS (not to mention product and services that are built using other services that depend on those)?

Because you said

> I can do anything I want without Apple, Visa, Google and even Amazon and Microsoft.

So if "some service" that you use uses them, then you're not doing anything you want without them.

When the American concept of free speech was coined, it was valuable because you could go stand in a government owned square and communicate your message for free. It was a good balance between not forcing private companies to accept speech but still allowing the speech to happen.

Online we don't have the concept of a government run square, and so your speech can be totally stifled by private companies.

But the difference is that when you're standing in the town square shouting nonsense, your reach is constrained, your ability to reproduce your speech is low (you have to just stand there and keep shouting) and everyone knows who you are. Damaging speech just can't be that damaging. Online is totally different.

I think the argument of "Google can't censor you, only the government can" is not great because there's no gov't equivalent of the town square. But I don't think the answer is just "make Google accept all speech" or "create a gov't equivalent of the town square" is necessarily the answer either. I think we should be starting from first principles and understand what free speech is trying to accomplish and come up with a framework that helps us accomplish it.

Free speech has always been about distribution as well - publishing a book or a newspaper, distributing pamphlets - those had similar reach to a random FB post or YT video today (in terms of percentage of the population).

Of course newspapers had no obligation to carry anyone's message, but, far more importantly, a newspaper couldn't be censored by government for printing stuff the government didn't like.

It's also important to remember that there used to exist many more newspapers - factories would have newspapers, most towns would have one or two, many clubs and similar organizations would have one.

Publishers (like newspapers) had full control over their content, and also had full responsibility for it (e.g., if they printed something libelous, they could be sued).

Common carriers (like the phone company) had no control over the content, and no responsibility for it, either (you couldn't sue the phone company if someone used the phone to plan a crime, for instance).

Google and their ilk want to have it both ways. They want the full control of publishers, and the zero responsibility of common carriers.

Historically, power without responsibility has invariably been a recipe for abuse.

I think they should have to choose one or the other.

I don’t have a better answer.

Justice Thomas is hardly a reliable source for making it so.

AT&T is an ISP among other carrier things.

How can a server, or a set of servers be anything more than an endpoint?

That you would compare ATT and FB shows a remarkable misunderstanding of the internet and WWW.

Consumers only get to choose out of what's available, and in this market, it's hard for an entrepreneurial consumer to make some things available when the market isn't providing them.

The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. So I’d rather let individual companies decide where they draw the line and if that happens to be not where you’d agree, then you can go support an alternate, if this there are many, who draws the line elsewhere. And for those who don’t want a private entity owning the infrastructure, there is always solutions like IPFS.

True, but I currently trust the line drawn by the law orders of magnitude more than I trust the one drawn by a bunch of faceless reactionaries at a handful of megacorps.

Also, theoretically, I can participate in changing the law when it's either insufficient or overbearing. I have zero say in the corporate policies of the day.

The law always lags behind what might defame a company(FB is the most recent example), hence the company ends up being proactive.

Edit: I don't have strong opinions - just sharing a rational argument for being proactive.

If you can determine that a particular piece of information belongs to some unpleasant or dangerous category, mark it as that, like a spam filter does, or vaguely how FB does with posts. Importantly, do not remove it unless the law forces you to.

Then let users switch between the filtered and unfiltered view, or look at the analog of the "Spam" folder.

This allows to study pieces of information that are deemed "controversial" or even "malevolent" and make your own opinion, if you're so inclined.

Even more, it could apply several different cultural filters, like "content likely offensive for X", where X is a major religious or cultural group, much the same way as many providers currently mark content as inappropriate for children.

The Govt pontificates about big tech issues without putting in the effort of making laws. Big tech is forced to anticipate what might defame them or be used by the Govt as ammo to garner public sympathy. It is a delicate balancing act between censorship and freedom.

Zuck tried to put the onus on the Govt to define right and wrong, true and false, but to no avail. It is hard to please everybody unfortunately.

Even for the things that are illegal, it can be illegal to publish something but legal to provide connectivity services to the offender.

Net neutrality is not a delicate balance.

Or what’s a tricky edge case you have in mind?

Information warfare is fairly real and potent in how it has weakened US democracy and vaccination efforts recently. Ultimately, arguably, this has real consequences for the economy, national security etc.

You're correct in your observation but state-sanctioned censorship is not the solution.

In case we're talking around each other; what kind of laws would you like to see put in place?

I don't have strong opinions on solutions here, and don't mind the status quo.

I mean... yes? People are ultimately responsible for their own worldview and vote. They are also perfectly entitled to consume any information from any source they please, aren't they?

Media censorship did very well exist in pre-tech journalism as well and was more blatant. Eg. Iraq war WMD claims etc. Big tech censorship mirrors this but in a very limited manner since we know it is happening at any point in time and such information is available outside of the major platforms, which wasn't the case pre mainstream internet.

Ultimately, big tech regulation of content is similar to how a WSJ or NYT would manage what they publish. They've been forced into this position with all the criticism over the last few years - it isn't something they wanted to invest in. It looks more like censorship because of the stepping back from the previously laissez faire approach to content, whereas NYT's baseline was self regulation (so it wasn't as apparent). Big tech media is privately held like a bar or a restaurant and in my opinion have every right to control who is on the platform and what is not ok to say - if one doesn't like it - they can leave.

If you live in a more populous state like California, you have much less voting power in the Senate and somewhat less voting power in the house and the executive office.

I can much more easily leave a company that I don’t like than the government. A company does not have the power of the state to impose its will on me.

This is the same government that less than a year ago wanted to come down on Saturday Night Live for being mean and is passing laws on the state level right now to forbid teachers from teaching history that doesn’t conform to it’s world view.

It never ceases to amaze me that people want to give the same entity more power that can and will actually take your freedom away.

No, but it may have the economic power of a (near or total) monopoly to do that which - depending on the time and the place - may be more powerful than the state.

Yet.

Corporations like amazon and google might not be self-perpetuating due to the entropy concentration inherent in companies that get that large but imagine if you had a organization of that size controlled by an AI officer team. It'll happen, just a matter of how long it takes.

And I should be more worried about corporations evading taxes?

I can tell you I’m much less worried about walking into any of the Big Tech companies and being treated unfairly than I am driving down the street and being harassed by instruments of the government.

As far as using AI to discriminate. Law enforcement and the government has been discriminating for hundreds of years. They don’t need AI to decide to harass me.

That’s one version of the story. The other version is that teachers under direction from their union (NEA) are teaching unfactual revisionist history (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-proje...), mixed with a near-religious activist ideology (https://areomagazine.com/2019/01/25/the-theory-of-white-frag...), and corrupting education by converting schools into political indoctrination centers.

The easiest answer for all these problems is decentralization and choice. Google and other tech companies are effectively governments. They hold power and influence over billions, are insulated from competition by network effects, and also regularly act in monopolistic ways. They need to be broken up and regulated.

Until tech companies can take away property via imminent domain, money via civil forfeiture, or put me in jail, they are not anything like the government.

A. Private companies cannot force you to do a single thing! Governments have entire agencies and departments dedicated to keeping people they deem dangerous in line, using a list of powers up to and including the right to take their citizens lives, if they do choose. No private company has this kind of power! Not even close!

B. People are not empty vessels, free to be molded by wiley corporate villains. People possess values and opinions, and (much to the chagrin of both corporations and politicians) it is very difficult to change people's minds.

Ok, I agree that Q Anon, anti-vax chat and so on and so forth causes more harm than good. But is it really the governments place to dictate that? What if the government was the one setting these narratives (not that hard to imagine given Trump and Johnson are two of the biggest serial liars in western political history)? Remember Trump threatened to shut Twitter down because Twitter fact checked Trumps post about election rigging.

For free speech to work, you absolutely need companies to be responsible for what they consider acceptable content rather than the government to dictate it.

If this all came with a duty of interoperability, I would be fine with that. But walled gardens that do their utmost to make leaving them really unpleasant and possibly expensive to the users ... that sounds a lot like coercion. And European law usually recognizes that individuals coerced, even softly, by large businesses, need protection.

I agree that they should be able to change their policies but if they are going to edit content then they should be treated like any other publication that has editors and be held legally responsible for the content that they publish.

A better approach would be to give the user an option to select between filtered and unfiltered content on install with the default being unfiltered and the filtering being provided by the users preferred third party entity.

People might talk about FAANG as having “monopolies” but the web was built on independent Joes hosting personal websites and if the content is good then people will eventually find their way there. And we’ve seen the rise of other social platforms precisely because people have felt they wanted to communicate under differed TOS, so this isn’t even a theoretical point.

Your reasoning would say I could join a kids cartoon group and post extreme pornography because it’s legal and if any parents object then they should have the law changed to ban porn for everyone.

Quite obviously that’s a dumb way of managing online content. Let the platforms manage what content they deem appropriate for their specific audiences and if you really want a zero-censorship community then you personally should join one rather than forcing every man, woman and child into wading through the same content you personally enjoy.

I'm not entirely sure that's the best model for today, but that's the historic model for a private business that's compelled to allow all legal speech. That's why UPS and FedEx still have to deliver to the New Order (the current incarnation of the American Nazi party).

Does it really matter who? The point is it is a corporate term of service and if anyone doesn’t like it then they’re free to use another platform (of which there are many).

> what happens to your data when they do?

That’s a more interesting question. In an ideal world everyone would have offline backups of anything posted online but clearly that’s an unrealistic expectation. I’d hope the platform would offer its users a path to migrate off, even if their account has been publicly banned. Sadly history has demonstrated that’s almost never the case.

Maybe that is where the government legislation needs to be? Stating that banned accounts have a grace period to back up their content?

> These massive corporations have found that they don't need to value customer support and that includes immediately blocking you from everything you have at their discretion.

I agree but that’s a tangential point and legislating that Google et al host any content and all legal content wouldn’t fix the customer service problem.

But I agree, platforms should be neutral. And people should still strive to control as much of their online properties as possible. Not just give it to Amazon and Google.

Eternal September was 1993. maybe this golden age of the internet where everyone was civil and educated and almost nothing was subject to censorship didn't really exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

If you said something like this in the 1940s, you'd get a bunch of people nodding their heads in agreement and using it to justify the McCarthy hearings.

Maybe I'm naive, but I still believe the lesser of the two evils is to err on the side against censorship.

Also, if you've spent any time with crazy conspiracy theorists, you'd know that letting the government/corporations/media act as censors just adds fuel to that fire.

They use the term "the good guys", literally those words, to describe those in the federal government who are supposedly fighting a secret war against a pedophile cabal that will culminate in a military coup.

Interestingly enough, even those conspiracy theorists who haven't fallen down the far right conspiracy rabbithole are also assuming the federal government and military are on their side. A popular conspiracy theory is that the government is gearing up to disclose that UAP reports are actually evidence of alien contact. In those that hold this view, there's a widespread reverence for military members' testimony, and an almost implicit assumption that they are nearly infallible because of their military training. Instead of distrusting the government, they're eagerly awaiting for it agree with them and confirm their personal feelings towards reports of UAPs.

Why is information intelligence not taught in schools?

Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant. There will always be a group of nutters who believe in flat earth, that vaccines cause autism, etc... Trying to cut that off at the source just throws these people into underground cults. A more scalable, sustainable solution is to

1) teach people to do their research - properly, as in, don't go on Facebook and join "Flat Earth Society Boston" to find The Truth

2) teach people it's okay to change their minds - part of this spreading cultism is that political opinions are now core identities

3) teach people to tolerate opposing viewpoints, even the silly ones - point and laugh, but don't try to cancel and destroy their lives

Another thing - every time a tweet or document is censored, the replies are generally cut off as well. How can people learn to distinct true and false if they don't get to see examples of people being wrong and corrected.

No. People have limited processing cycles in their heads, and you never notice the bullshit you fall for, so you can't correct for errors you're making. Critical thinking skills are great, but they don't provide you expert-level knowledge in every field, nor can they. Sometimes your educated heuristics are just plain wrong and someone else has better information you don't have access to. I see this all the time here with content in my field - developers just get law wrong all the time.

You might remember an era when email inboxes were FLOODED with a deluge of dick pills, get rich quick schemes, Nigerian prince scams, and other low-effort, low-value content. Sure you might be able to avoid clicking on garbage, but the general health of your inbox declined dramatically.

Does that mean society is going to end because we've trampled upon the rights of the latest Cialis replacement to spam my inboxes? Probably not.

So you're suggesting we should remove Johnnys fearmongering, conspiracy post, because we should listen to the experts?

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-mas...

Experts clearly say that "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,"

Expert knowledge by WHO.

...and a month later, we should delete Bobbys post too? Do we undelete Johnnys post?

The expert knowledge was that mass usage of masks early on in the pandemic could prevent frontline healthcare workers from accessing needed supplies while logistics spun up to meet demand.

"There also is the issue that we have a massive global shortage," Ryan said about masks and other medical supplies. "Right now the people most at risk from this virus are frontline health workers who are exposed to the virus every second of every day. The thought of them not having masks is horrific."

This is literally the third paragraph.

When community spread began to drive the bulk of new infections and we've had months to spin up production on masks, obviously mass adoption changes in value.

They didn't say "it helps, but we're unable to call wallmart and buy all their stock, so we're asking you not to buy them, so we can", they said that there's no evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit... those are two different things.

The very next statement by Dr. Ryan "There also is the issue that there is a massive global shortage, and where should these masks be, and where is the best benefit? Because one can argue there's a benefit in anything, and where does a given tool have it's best benefit? And right now the people who are most at risk are frontline health workers [...]"

The follow up statement is also very emphatic that this is about mask allocation due to constrained supply. I don't get why you're trying to ignore the very clear context of the statement.

There were two studies circulating around that time. One of passengers of a bus and another of a restaurant. The bus one found that the passengers wearing masks did not catch the virus and many of those that did not wear masks did catch it. The restaurant one found that people in the flow of AC air caught it and those not in it did not. That meant that it was airborne and there was some evidence suggesting mask effectiveness.

Why should you listen to the CDC, WHO, etc… when there is a better predictor of reality?

I don't think that's the core of what I'm saying. I'm saying people have limited mental time, so devoting an unlimited volume of time to sorting through bullshit is not feasible.

Everyone is going to need to make choices, but if statistically the options presented before them are better, we'd expect better outcomes in general.

'Critical thinking' is one of those things that people keep raising as the catch all solution. This line of reasoning states that it doesn't matter what options are on offer because people will calculate the best ones! Unfortunately, they don't.

Most of our language fluency tests rate people's skills in this area; take the ACTFL scale for instance. The sad reality is that when people are provided with language based reasoning testing, many people perform fairly poorly due to common errors, even in test-based situations. People misread statements, misunderstand their meaning, have trouble moving from specific to general or vice versa, have difficulties tailoring their message to their audience, etc.

In general, the very HIGHEST level of linguistic ability in specifically tested scenarios is what we assume out of everyone as the baseline when having these discussions about social discourse. This is an unreasonable starting point.

    As noted above, the first bullet of the main findings states that the heatwave was "virtually impossible without human-caused climate change."  Sounds very certain, doesn't it?  Virtually impossible.

    Then read their next bullet:  

    "The observed temperatures were so extreme that they lie outside the range of historically observed temperatures.  This makes it hard to quantify how rare the event was"

    On one hand, they say it is hard to quantify how rare or unusual the event was, but on the other, they claim the event was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change. 

    Both statements can not be true.  You can't be uncertain and certain at the same time.

> In other words the data is so different from historical data that there's only one reason why: human-caused climate change.

No that’s not the case. This PNW event would have happened with or without climate change. The study being critiqued used a hyperbolic claim that the event was “virtually impossible without climate change” even though their own data shows it was virtually impossible (highly improbable) either way, and that it was more due to a rare coincidence of many factors. The Professor who wrote this post I linked also has prior posts analyzing this event and showing that really climate change contributed a few degrees to the peak temperatures, but that it would have been a record breaking event either way.

    Their next claim is that the June heatwave was enhanced by 2°C by global warming, which is not out of the realm of possibility.  

    But think about it.  Considering that they state that the heatwave had maximum temperatures 16-20°C warmer than normal, by their OWN ADMISSION only about 10% of the heatwave was the result of global warming.  Thus, a record-breaking, unique heat wave would have occurred without global warming.   

    Imagine if they had stated that.  You would not have seen many headlines: Global warming contributed 10% of the heatwave!

Imagine that global warming dries out a forested area to the point where it catches fire due to being so dry. This guy is saying the equivalent of "the fire burned at 800°C, and global warming only accounts for 0.25% of that!"

I gave the article a fair chance, and facepalmed repeatedly at his inane arguments. He's a crank and you should ignore him.

Conversely, what should we teach children today about the information threats of the 2050s?

No: much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to vaccines (i.e. education on how to spot deception, knowledge of what scams are currently going on). Enough people trying to deceive you, and eventually someone will succeed.

A quick googling suggests that the first wave of closures was in 2015 [1] after a crushing wave of negative publicity and advertiser pullouts. The other really high-profile one was r/The_Donald, which wasn't closed until 2020 and even has its own Wikipedia article. [2]

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/06...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald

----

EDIT: Actually, looks like r/jailbait was closed much earlier, in 2011, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...

But certainly prior to June 2015, there was much, much broader tolerance for racist, sexist, transphobic content on the site.

And now it has moved to other, more hidden platforms, where there is noone to write counterarguments, and sometimes (tor, freenet,...) impossible to identify someone who writes actual threats and not just "yo momma so fat..." jokes.

But in any case, "people will find alternatives" has never been a valid reason not to act (either here or in other popular cases such as guns/suicide). There is real value in having standards of conduct that go above and beyond the bare minimum of "not illegal." Moral and ethical value, of course, but also economic— in the reddit case, ultimately being a place that was viable for ad spends by mainline brands who wouldn't want to be associated with a site whose public image was that of being a safe space for hate speech.

Google is a little different since there's no r/all page for GDrive that can be gamed to show this content, and nor is Google likely as worried about the safety of its reputation as an advertiser.

Should they only host or also surface "everything"? Is deranking something censoring? What about not promoting something? If the idea is every thing is given equal weight, then things pretty quickly becomes a cesspool.

It was in the early part of the 2010's that Google, Twitter and others started censoring Islamic content in the name of antiterrorism and stopping the spread of extremism on their platforms.

There are some more problematic areas where the Constitution itself is inconsistent. Copyright should not exist, for one; the core concept is utterly incompatible with freedom of speech. The Supreme Court even recognized this at one point—it's why we have the concept of "fair use" in the first place—but "fair use" is a poor compromise which does not fully negate the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have one clause saying that Congress has the power (but not the obligation) to do something which would infringe on the freedom of speech, and another clause later passed as an amendment saying "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech", the obvious reconciliation of these clauses is that Congress is barred from exercising that enumerated power because it would violate the later amendment. The Court tried to strike a balance instead… but it still amounts of Congress passing a law which abridges the freedom of speech, despite the limitations imposed by the Court.

I should note that I am anti-censorship and consider such laws absurd, but my point is that we can't rely on readings of the constitution to self-evidently protect us from such things.

What part of "shall make no law" isn't clear? It's true that obscenity is an exception to 1A, but that's something that some people made up after the fact, in direct contravention to the framers' stated intention.

The founders weren't short on ink. If they had wanted to equivocate, they were certainly free to do so. The fun really starts when some people decide that their (least) favorite amendments are subject to less (more) interpretation than others.

Then, after we have that working, and we want to remove the CP, find another way. Do it on the client side or whatever.

Self harm, terrorism, revenge porn, fabricated news. Just to name a few.

Internet is very different from what we experienced in the 90s. The ingress barrier guaranteed good content (or at least entertaining content). Now the barrier to content submission has been lowered so much that really anything makes on the Web and this is not good. There are reasons, after all, for having locks on entrance doors, right?

I am quite happy that Google "got the message" from regulators that misinformation is a real danger and we should apply zero tolerance to web polluters.

And, just to make the point of how hard it is to get consensus here, I'll disagree with you about the CP under some conditions.

I think others will too.

For example some would say that voluntarily made CP (e.g. 17 year old's nude pics) should be uncensored, others might just include an exception for simulated images, still others would say allow everything as long as there's a very low likelihood of victim or victim's connections stumbling across it and no money is changing hands.

We need to collectively grow up and acknowledge that not all disagreements can coexist and solve them.

Religious domination, violent intimidation, subtle suggestive manipulation, outright marketing lies, even government propaganda should all be censored to some extent to just be within the law

These plarforms must be editors and yes it means less trash / second being published.

Within the law from which jurisdiction? :-)

Oh... it's only you that gets a "...but for the stuff I believe is harmful" in there?

Within the law of which country?

Should copyrighted content be blocked in the US? What about in the Netherlands?

Should Holocaust denying content be blocked in Germany? What about in the US?

Should anti-CCP content be allowed in China? What about outside China?

If you want to do the bare minimum according to the law, you are going to need a different implementation for every country. And even then people in countries with more lax laws are going to think you are acting unethically by censoring content in more restrictive countries and vice versa.

EDIT: I have no idea why a comment that amounts to "different countries have different laws" is being downvoted.

I'm not sure why this is a revelation.

It even is mentioned on its Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus_on_climat...

Even someone like Senate leader Mitch McConnell isn’t denying it anymore. Research is still ongoing to what extend we are going to be impacted.

So, even if someone is denying climate change or reading misinformation, it doesn’t change that man made climate change is here, and what its causes are.

So yeah, there is scientific consensus in that area on the broad perimeters.

Now if you believe something different, that just goes against what we already established!

Once you get into questions like, by how much is it changing, are those changes a big deal or not that serious, by how much does it really affect the weather, even what the actual history of global temperature is, there is a lot of disagreement even amongst scientists, although of course given the tiny size and cliquey nature of many academic fields, criticism from outside the field must always be considered as well.

While everyone is free to come up with different answers, there isn’t anything credible at the moment.

A friend of mine programs climate models based on latest mathematical insights and data. For 10 years he would put his hand in a fire that it is happening and it will be bad.

Point by point : How much is changing? 2 degrees hotter on average. How does it affect weather? More outliers such as the recent heat wave in the NW of USA. Is it a big deal? Yes, because it unbalances a lot of eco systems and our ability to cope with it. History of global temperature? Has been measured for hundreds of years now and we can deduce temperatures before that. There is a lot of disagreements between scientists? No there isn’t (97% banks on man made climate change) Clique nature of academic fields? That’s an entirely different topic and doesn’t change the data.

Also “history” is a broad term. I would say a true scientific method didn’t mature until roughly the 19th century.

Governments and leaders are concerned that people don't trust them, yet the truth is, they don't deserve to be trusted. When the system is designed to create a placated populace instead of critical thinkers, those in charge are routinely lying and blatantly misleading instead of informing, then it's no surprise people will believe in all kinds of fringe ideas.

Hiding and shunning information can be a temporary band aid, but the inevitable effect is that people will trust official sources even less.

Yes. Both sides can agree that they think the other believes in falsehods. Since one person has one vote, there is effectively nothing you can do about it.

I think you're going a little far there, and the fact that you're using this to justify censorship is pretty ugly.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/28/amazon-removes-books-promoti...

I'm not going too far I'm speaking empirically. Almost 1/4 of the population has an IQ less than 90 and is empirically challenged and a substantial portion of the remainder including those with reasonable or even high IQ are completely dysfunctional because regardless of how functional a brain they were born with they have basically ruined it by training it only to consume and create trash.

One has only to talk to a large enough number of your fellow humans to realize half of them are in fact dumber than dirt. If there weren't literature about bleaching your childs insides to cure their autism or other insanity of the same grade would find no takers.

If you find the number of bleach swillers insufficient consider thatnearly 40% of us in America believe that a genie created the earth less than 10k years ago. Overwhelmingly this is because they do not possess the intellectual aptitude to dismiss this theory. If their brains were highly functioning they would do so despite conditioning. Plenty of people will live 70-100 years and pass away in their hospital bed without ever ever having turned their brain into the on position.

On the flip side others aggressively question the reality they are given but because they lack the inherent intelligence or have spent their entire intellectual life consuming the equivalent of junk food they are utterly incapable of discerning the difference between insane fantasy and truth.

Most of us here are presuming (I presume) that we are immune from misinformation, disinformation etc. Why is that? What quality distinguishes we,the observers,from they,the victims?

It seems obvious that education might be the decider. But I'd like to know. What quality of the HN reader distinguishes him from the victim of misinformation?

If the Washington Post ran an article that stated that a former NASA scientist believed the rate of climate change was vastly higher than previously anticipated I would probably buy it.

If it later turned out his specialty was Chemistry, he had been fired for using his expertise to make meth, and his research was bunkum I would have to eat crow and watch that publication far more carefully.

On a more realistic note I believed to my chagrin that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and reading of some of the awful crimes of Saddam I thought not going in would be a great act of moral evil as it would mean abandoning the citizens to be victimized by a monster. 21 year old me didn't realize there was no good proof of WMDs, that we would kill half a million of them, and that we might well leave them no better off if our efforts collapsed shortly after we left.

Insofar as what separates the reasonable from the rubes

- A modest amount of accumulated understandings about how history,science, math, stats etc work sufficient to reject obviously untrue statements

- The understanding that everything you understand or think you know ought to be criticized and revised over time in response to new evidence. Valuing truth over authority and conformity.

- An understanding of the common failure modes of logic and reason so that you can recognize bullshit when you see it

- A reasonably strategy to use all of the above to evaluate sources continually to see if they are and remain trustworthy.

These big tech companies do not have the power to silence anyone.

Just like you can ban people you don't like from yours.

It's interesting to see this dichotomy between platforms and publishers in these types of threads. I assume it stems from a reading of Section 230 somehow, but the word "platform" never appears in that text.

In my opinion you should just because it is the only way to make sure that your platform is not taken seriously and will prompt people to read something a bit more serious. It will stir controversies on twitter but who in IRL seriously considers an opinion of a twitter person?

Edit: I went for a smoke I thought about it a bit more, take a look at voat vs reddit. Voat was created as a response to censorship on reddit and look at the cesspool of a place it is. Companies do not censor content because they have a moral stand or a political agenda, they moderate the content because otherwise it will turn into a shit you wouldn't believe (HN does it to). There is much more trolls on the internet responding to everything they can than legitimate people trying to have a discussion.

New Eternal September started with social media and those not hardened by the internet before have a hard time to just dismiss what they read as 'a troll'

I'd argue that there is already a (fairly) tried and tested process in place to deal with this, it's the legal system.

There are plenty of media outlets that publish stuff I don't particularly like, but almost none of it is illegal, so - to be blunt - I just have to suck it up.

Some of my friends have opinions that I - at times - violently disagree with, but I file that under one of the side effects of life, and I deal with it.

I'm rarely "outraged" by companies hosting stuff. If it's illegal, knock yourself out and get it taken down.

However if it's just really, really annoying or you find it against your own worldview, perhaps take a deep breath / drink a cup of tea* / go to the gym / hug your OH, and move on to something more important?

* or gin :)

1) Get to know people in your community who hold differing opinions. We all need to be doing this more - fostering friendship over the things we have in common. This isn't easy, but the Western world used to be far better at it.

2) Engage in healthy debate, which means advocating a specific opinion in a public way -- either speech, column in your local newspaper, etc. -- with carefully researched references/sources, no ad-hominem attacks, assuming good faith and intent on the part of those who disagree, and respect for the differing opinions of others.

Imagine if every local community did (1) and (2) -- people would be a lot happier and would be less likely to hold unsupportable opinions, since even cursory research (i.e. prior to publicly arguing in favor of them) would show those opinions have no basis in reality.

The real problem isn't those who disagree with you or hold "bad ideas", it's those who would take away everyone's freedom to disagree in peace.

The best marker of sweeping political radicalism is when no one is allowed to be neutral anymore--not even news outlets or public forums. When everything is political and everyone is forced out of political neutrality, we're in big trouble as a society.

"If you're not for us, you're against us" is an ominous statement in any context, and when that becomes a mainstream political cry, it signals that freedom itself is coming to an end (not to mention freedom of speech).

You could never walk into a private bar and demand the right to hand out Nazi propaganda, solely on the merits that "well, that's where all the people are!!"

As for neutrality, there are plenty of actively neutral companies, in action, today. They're just not very popular. Because they're filled with horrible people who demand the right to say horrible things. And no one wants to hang out with those people.

Now that the market has decided horrible beings aren't entitled to anyone else's space, the horrible human beings are insisting that the big mean bullies be forced, through threat of violence, to tolerate them.

It's nonsense all the way down.

All my violent disagreements are the latter not the former! :)

Is this actually true? I only think certain fringe Twitter groups are mad that companies host controversial things.

If by "we" you mean US politicians and mass media, then sure. But I'm not sure that's true for the general populace in the US, nor for other countries.

On another note - I don't like that they host things, at all. That is, I don't like that the entity which runs a search engine is also the one which hosts a large part of the videos available for free on the Internet. Or that a company making popular computing hardware like Apple is also the host and gatekeeper for mobile apps, podcasts etc.

Consider the Irish Troubles. Consider the US Civil Rights movement.

The US revolutionary movement might be a more clear example where violent action was decisive.

The problem with censorship by Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Google is different. Here the government is putting pressure on the tech companies to censor content they don't like. Censor the bad people or risk antitrust action.

It's so gross and so clearly in violation of the first amendment. Even elected officials and professors are not exempted. It doesn't matter if you're elected by the people or if you're an expert in your field, if you say something that is considered 'misinformation' by the Ministry of Truth you get censored. It's outrageous, and if big tech doesn't change course we need to start building alternative platforms. But it might already be too late.

As far as I can tell, no shift of the overton window begins with 'normal people', rather it always ends with 'normal people'. Any campaign of this nature is a long and sustained effort over months and years. One requiring that normal people precede them on the wave of change is a guarantee that one will never begin to move in the first place.

I don't remember electing them to control this aspect of life. And where does it stop? What is the line? Who is actually defining these things?

When a small group of people control the definition of "wrong think" then we're gonna have a problem regardless of which side of the argument those people are on.

While your question is innocent enough, I get the feeling you already knew the answer.

You aren't even touching on the complexities. The original article was about "misleading content". Google is asserting that they will take action on "content that deceives, misleads, or confuses users".

Good grief.

One of these days, I'm going to go live in the woods and no internet. People clearly do not want a free society anymore so I may as well just check out.

Until then, those of us with kids, can't afford to checkout. We have to secure a future for our children.

The, "Won't somebody please think of my children" excuse is a little selfish considering there are people with differing opinions (who may or may not have children too).

Also: their violence is speech.

any group like 'occupy democrats' 'vets against trump' - would be gone.

If they would do these to the search results, most of the news sites would not longer have top positions! I'm liking this now.

"content that deceives, misleads, or confuses users"

- funny that I used to ask people on fbook some years ago when they posted some things, 'do you believe the thing you are re-posting is true or fake? Is it funny or serious? Do you think your 'followers' think it's true when they see you post it?

Trying to determine the understanding of the re-poster - but also the 'intent' of them re-sharing - sadly I think most of the time it was to 'deceive' aka virtue signal tribe thing - even when they admitted things may not be true, they still wanted the thing posted and shared - and knowing others may not look at it and not know it's not true.

need to think on this longer. Wait, when g/f/t thought the hunter laptop was fake they affected our national elections and discourse, when they did not care if golden shower oppo research was true or fake it affected real world stuff.

Not so sure these folks can be trusted with deciding what should be shared as true/false actually. The reach and effects of these decisions are large and serious.

They own and operate a service called Google Drive. They offer that service under whatever terms they decide. And the decisions they make are relevant to their own service. They likely also don't allow you to use their service to distribute illegal material.

>I don't remember electing them to control this aspect of life. And where does it stop? What is the line? Who is actually defining these things?

Google has the right to make this decision on their own platform. They don't have the right to make this decision outside of their platform, and are not attempting to do so. They're not a government. They cannot control what other sites do. They don't have an army. They're not burning textbooks or jailing teachers. They're not controlling the definition of "wrong think."

If you don't like what they're doing, you're welcome not to use their service. Google Drive isn't the only cloud-based document backup service by a long shot.

Specifically I noted my willingness to use their services / indirectly support that company if I have the choice.

Yet it is rational to oppose distribution of what you think is wrong and promote distribution of what you think is right. You must have a hidden premise in there somewhere.

So, assuming you are acting rationally, you are right now promoting what you think is "right" ("anything legal", "1st amendment" eg the United States's Constitution), while countering what you think is "wrong".

If you didn't believe in the promotion of what you think is right, then you wouldn't be posting to argue against what you think is wrong! You would never upvote (bias) or downvote (censorship) and so on. Sure, you could argue that your style of promotion (comments on HN), or that promoting your worldview in general is better for certain outcomes, but ultimately your still just arguing for "freedom" in your particular definition of "freedom" (still promoting or opposing distribution of right/wrong)

> regardless of whether it has the same intent or potential effect.

I disagree, and I think I'm in the majority to have more outcomes-based ethics [1]

What I'm trying to get across is that you are "politically active", whether you think you are or not. "Activism" can literally involve just a bunch of friends on an online platform upvoting and downvoting. Even just a small group of people doing this can even be effective censorship in certain contexts, such as local elections. Sure, Google may have more cost-effective means of censorship --- larger political campaigns have to pay firms LOADS to bury stories or control online discourse without access to the power Google has --- but it's still the same result, just a matter of who calls the shots and cost-efficacy.

You might argue that controlling discourse like this is not censorship or unethical based on your definition, but as you said it can have the same intent and has the same potential effect, so to another perspective, perhaps one that places less value on the USA constitution, it most certainly is.

[1] About 90%, in the case of a survey question about the trolley problem - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem#Survey_data

Your point about downvotes being censorship is troubling and gives me pause. I think it’s only censorship because of how HN fades the comment towards illegibility. But I have always thought that is a user-hostile design choice. I’d much rather you could see the score, but still be able to read them easily. I have spent enormous amounts of time carefully reading people I disagree with.

(FWIW, I did not downvote you, and I do so rarely.)

I agree. Actually I'd almost forgotten they did that since I use the StyleBot extension and have ".commtext { color: black; }" in the CSS for this site, which overrides the fading. I also enabled the setting to show "dead" comments; they aren't always worth reading, but it happens more often than you might think.

Actually that's another aspect in its own right—HN doesn't just fade downvoted comments but removes them altogether if they're downvoted enough. And sometimes comments are actually deleted by the administrators and not just marked as "dead" and hidden from the page by default. It's their site, and I would uphold their right to not be forced to host comments they object to against their will, but there is some actual censorship going on and not just convenient "curation" of what shows up clearly in the default view.

I don't see downvotes as censorship when the downvoted comment is still available for those who care to read it, and not actually deleted. To me it's more of an indication that, in the reader's opinion, the comment was perceived as not contributing to the discussion. In general I prefer to upvote the good comments and save the downvotes for trolling, flamebait, etc. which would be likely to derail the thread. To put it in words, an upvote is like saying "check this out" while a downvote is either "don't waste your time" or "this thread belongs somewhere else". But you can still see the downvoted comments if you want.

Yeah I'm not really making my point clear here, sorry.

My point is that a "values-neutral" platform doesn't exist, and every attempt to build such a thing is usually only "values-neutral" from the perspective of it's creator. For example, I'd argue there's a contradiction even in the way you phrased it here: "Legal speech" implies you are indeed giving "regard for agreement with the content", since this would imply suppressing content that is not in agreement with some legal framework you have in mind.

> I think it’s only censorship because of how HN fades the comment towards illegibility.

It's not just that. Upvotes promotes one position over the other, so when one considers statistical properties of how far people scroll down, or how likely people are to expand low-voted comments or go to another page (for platforms like Reddit, HN, etc), the effect can be the same.

It's interesting to see that as online platforms gradually replace "traditional" journalism for how people get information, we're rehashing a some of the same old arguments about what is "objective" journalism. Publishing ANYTHING, whether physical documents (eg newspapers) or HTML documents (eg HN, Facebook), will always promote some worldview and censor another based on what is included in the publication, and the ordering of the topics.

Sometimes this censorship is explicit (eg nixing a story, Google taking down a search result), other times it's done statistically (eg putting stuff "below the fold", a search result being on page 10), but our informational world is perpetually being shaped like this. Pretending that's it's even logically possible have unbiased platforms "without regard for agreement with the content" --- as an example, not you, but elsewhere here it was claimed 2010-2016 was mostly censorship-free --- is starting off on a wrong premise. If we start on a wrong premise, any further discussion is meaningless at best, and actively manipulative at worse (Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan comes to mind)

> (FWIW, I did not downvote you, and I do so rarely.)

Thanks, I avoid this also!

Though I may be misunderstanding what you are getting to here.

While religion can be a real negative, it isn't generally the goal and often, there are good intentions. Genocide hurts people, though, through its nature. Anti-vaccine propaganda hurts folks as well. You simply cannot have these movements without hurting folks.

Ponzi schemes? Crypto investments? Drugs? Gambling? Alcohol recipes? Sugar?

i-robot protect us all with truth! (except hunter laptop, and lab leak theory - hide those haha)

Actually - I am kind of okay with this new kindergarten gloves way of treating the people - let's give them the sharing a ability they deserve. California knows best what's good for everyone - just don't talk bad about beef. Well you may have to censor that in some other parts of the world.

Different kindergarten for different countries? different states?

Think how much better and safer this internet world is going to be without all these bad things!

They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook.

I dont want to derail the discussion into another political debate but my thesis, is that some ideology spread like plague in Silicon Valley. The Good vs Evil. As the OP said Google stated off being good, but somewhere along the line the definition of Good got twisted a little bit. They keep thinking they were so righteous they literally started a crusade or witch-hunt ( so to speak ).

And it is in some way interesting because it rhymes with many historical events.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

- John Dalberg-Acton

> They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook.

Steve "we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone" Jobs liked making devices for everyone but definitely not for everything they might want to do on them.

I didn't get that impression from that post...

The market has most certainly spoken: we prefer privacy, and we no longer want to be a product. Competition will come to fill those needs. No need for more government regulation. The free market works.

This laughable arrogance. The market has most certainly spoken but not in the way you and your microcosm think it has. The market doesn't give a fuck about privacy. They want convenience and want to pay as little as they for it. Privacy might seem to be on people's tongues at this moment and it will continue to be still, but only a core few will actually make decisions that inconvenience them in order to achieve it. Only a few million people are leaving services like WhatApp en-masse. 99% of their customers do not give a fuck. They aren't doing drug deals (well some are), they aren't dissidents, they aren't terrorists, they're just every day people going about their business with likely zero real repercussions other than finding it a bit creepy and continuing to scroll. There's probably more people leaving because things have gotten a bit boring and uncool than people taking a principled stand for privacy.

We are, at least currently, outliers. Do not forget that.

The risks of letting market competition sort it out are much smaller than the risks of making it a political football. As a political topic it is basically going to be two parties fighting over which set of lies get to be true. That won't be better.

Sorry, this has just been becoming a peeve for me on this site. I just want to know what you're trying to express by calling a company that is not privately owned, "private". Thanks.

And every once in a while, government does take over a company, like GM for a long time was a public company.

However, the first amendment is a restriction on government, not a restriction on private individuals or corporations.

And as an aside, how many of us really need to be reminded, several times per day, of the scope of the 1st amendment? Really? Isn’t it more likely it’s a tired debate stopper?

My feelings exactly. It doesn't accomplish anything and literally adds nothing to the debate. Does the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines imposed and cruel and unusual punishment only apply to the government too? Clearly, we can talk about the spirit of the Bill of Rights and apply that to things that aren't literally the government.

It's important because to many people (myself included) the spirit of the freedom of speech referred to in the 1st Amendment is that force (i.e. the exercise of government power) is not an appropriate or legitimate response to speech. Censorship in the broad sense involving hosting decisions by these organizations owned and run by private individuals is not a violation of the freedom of speech, because it does not involve the use of force.

> Does the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines imposed and cruel and unusual punishment only apply to the government too?

Essentially, yes. The general principle applies to any organization which would take it upon itself to impose fines or punishment… which basically means the government, because the government doesn't let anyone else do that in its territory. For any organization other than the government this rule would go without saying, but since the government claims to be able to impose fines and punishment according to its own rules, unfettered by the rules of proportional response and natural law, this limitation must be made explicit.

Yes, that's why people are pre-emptively raising the status of the corporations in question as private - to head off the discussion you're tired of hearing.

Despite that, instead of discussing what the proper ambit of content review should exist, 80% of the thread is still debating whether or not editorial control should exist in the first place; the exact same type of boring, rehashed discussion that adds nothing of value.

Now we're here having a meta discussion about the discussion that ALSO adds nothing of value, so it looks like no matter where we go there's no shortage of ink that leads nowhere :(.

Hah! By saying that you're also not focusing on the real issue. Got You! Hypocrite much? /s

Companies owned by private individuals (whether they're publicly traded on a stock market or not) are usually referred to as "private".

So that's what I meant - a company not controlled by a government and has no accountability beyond its private owners.

For instance, LibreOffice is looking at WASM:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/WASM

Just look at the puritanical rules concerning language and sexuality forced on broadcasters. Those rules are decades old and outdated and will likely remain forever.

When companies fuck up on censorship, the results seem to last only a few years. When governments fuck up, the consequences echo for multiple lifetimes.

If that MIT study about the end of the world turns out to be true, THIS type of woke bullshit will be the cause. And when society falls, I have a feeling who's gonna be gunned after first.

If society fails (which is little more than a prepper wet dream) everyone's going to go gunning for whoever has food and fuel. No one will care about Google or political parties.

Before civil rights, "private businesses" used the same exact excuse as big tech while refusing customers based on race.

In the current setup, big tech thrives risk-free via governmental protections separating them from their customers (or what their customers post on the platform). The underlying concept of social media has become a public utility, and should be protected as such. Once big tech began altering visibility of posts based on politics (in any way/shape/form), they crossed the Rubicon.

Government agencies tend get packed with appointees whose political interests undermine the agency's original charter.

To clarify my statement: "We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information." - I don't think that the structure provided by a company is sufficient to do this properly. Rather than companies/governments, we need protocols and standards. For instance, what if we had a decentralized app (dapp) built on something like cardano, that allowed one to edit docs that lived on an IPFS? We might have to sacrifice some micro-conveniences (e.g. google docs saves automatically for you as often as every few keystrokes) to make it tenable on something like a blockchain, but it seems feasible.

More specifically I used to use OneNote when it used the local file system and I could get to my data. Then MSFT puts everything behind a cryptic ten-layer hashed URI…

The tech industry is like an insurance company now selling people on fear of losing files or productivity—but I’d wager more often than not technology gets in the way of folks productivity. By technology I mean fluffy clouds because obviously tech CAN help.

We need a better balance and a lot of that starts by keeping it simple.

A lot of censorship has traditionally been governments threatening to regulate industries if they don't self regulate, and that's pretty much what's been going on.

to that end, google, facebook, et al. should each probably be split up into dozens of companies to start, with stong privacy, portability and interoperability standards/mandates at minimum.

Splitting up of these internet behemoths is so much overdue!

Take myself for example. I only ever get angry when I browse my facebook feed and for some reason I've actually taken steps to ensure I get angry when I browse my own feed (chalk it up to silicon magic). I would like to leave facebook, but if I do I'd lose messenger which is the easiest and most consistent way for me to keep in contact with dozens of people (who mostly don't make me angry).

If facebook protocols were open source, then by now I would likely have dozens of different options to take my friend's list to a messenger only app that does not include a feed for me to angrily browse.

Lowering the cost to leave is a benefit to everyone since it reduces the reach of that anger inducing feed.

Of course the "contract" with SNPs is that you "pay" with your eyeballs falling on adverts, and the ads in turn don't want to be anything like common carriers. So turning any web service into something like a common carrier would have interesting knock-on effects.

Did it occur to you that maybe the GP wasn’t suggesting a company solve the problem and was hinting at open source + open protocol?

2. You seem to be saying here that you want a specialized agency to do censorship right, as one centralized decision maker. Am I misunderstanding? A Ministry of Truth?

Private companies follow the wind of the policies that are there to coerce them. In this case, the policy that is being put in place is that misinformation is dangerous and should be countered.

In 5 years, misinformation could be relegated to Tor networks, where it belongs.

Why is it like that and not like gas stations not allowing smoking so their property doesn't go up in flames? It's really strange to think market forces must always be against consumer, there can be mutual benefit if the right incentives are put in place.

In the old days, computer companies made the hardware and government institutions used that to run the internet. This is how it should be. Companies should not be touching our data directly. They simply cannot handle the responsibility.

If our founding fathers had one guiding principle, it was to distribute power as much as possible as power has a strong tendency to concentrate and corrupt.

The whole point of free speech was not to have a government agency regulating and inspecting what you are allowed to say.

My guess is a combination of regulatory capture and apathy on the part of citizens for various reasons.

Easy answer. The modern GOP happened.

Unfortunately, the issue here is companies responding to something other than the market.

For one thing, it's easy to say 'well we'd only take down illegal content'. But in practice there isn't such a bright line, there's lots of borderline stuff, authorities could rule something posted on your site illegal after the fact- lots of these situations are up to a prosecutor's judgement call. Would you risk jail to push the boundaries? Coordinating 1/6 wasn't necessarily illegal until- it was.

If Islamic State is recruiting on Free Speech Drive, posting manifestos, encouraging Western residents to actual jihad- you wouldn't take that down? You'd leave it up if it hewed up to the line of being legal- really? Jailbait or non-nude pics of someone's teenage daughter, hosted in the thousands- you wouldn't take that down? It's easy to be an absolutist in an Internet argument, it's much harder when you face the sort of everyday content moderation issues you see in the real world

For example, if someone says something you don't like, you can intimidate them into shutting up by, say, threatening to reveal their personal information, such as their legal identity, address of residence, and so on. On certain corners of the Internet, merely dropping dox is good enough to get randos (who won't even be affiliated with you, so +1 to plausible deniability) to harass someone you want to shut up.

A more technical variant of this is DDoS attacks. Instead of trying to intimidate someone into shutting up with threats of stochastic terrorism; you shout over them by sending a bunch of traffic to their site until the server crashes or they run out of money.

So even if you're a hardcore free speech extremist, you still need to embrace some level of "censoring the censors" if you want the Internet to actually be usable.

As for the idea that people are deliberately flooding the zone with disinformation, I'm afraid I've only seen that coming from the sort of people who use it as an excuse to engage in censorship. There is certainly a massive disinformation problem, but it's not the one they mean when they say that. Consider the experience of this guy, who just "woke up" to the fact that the BBC has been manipulating him:

https://twitter.com/James_Townsend9/status/14156518191628984...

I myself watched a deceptive BBC news report last year in which they presented a social worker as a "dental specialist", a man whose brother died of COVID except the report admitted the cause of death was unconfirmed, and supposedly flooded ECMO unit that turned out to have spare beds available.

What's the problem with that? Bad things on the internet happen more often than not because of the lack of responsibility.

Doxxing has become the primary sin in the Internet religion but it would solve all kind of problems. I am going to commit that sin and say that Doxxing is the solution, you can downvote me and make my comment greyed out and censor me when you argue against censorship.

Instead of deleting content, simply make sure that it's linked to someone who can pay for it if it turn out to be something to be payed for.

The Anonymity argument is only good when you are actively persecuted by a state actor. I don't agree that you deserve anonymity because the public will demonise you. If you hold strong believes that can be met harshly by the general public, you better be ready for the pushback and think of ways to make it accepted. That's how it has been done since ever.

Therefore, when a content is questionable maybe the users should be simply KYC'ed en left alone until a legal take down order is issued. If its illegal(like illegal porn, copyrighted content, terroristic activities etc), go to prison for it. If its BS get your reputation tarnished.

Who the hell gets to judge what is 'to be payed for' in this world you're talking about? The mob? No thanks!

In fact the internet actually went to shit the minute it pivoted from 'Dont share your personal info publicly' to 'please give us every last drop of your personal information and share it publicly'

That’s the thing people don’t often consider - how will this policy/law/norm work when I’m not the one benefiting from it?

Those who demand the payment, obviously.

Denying the existence of the god or being gay could be something to be payed for in some places and obviously that is horrible thing but anonymity doesn't solve that.

Fighting for a change or leaving that place solves something. Alan Turing himself was subjected to these things in the United Kingdom. A few decades later things changed in the UK and had nothing to do with the anonymity.

Now those who think that gays deserve equal rights demand payment. Again, anonymity it's not helping the anti-gay folks but simply creates low quality discussion and stress and nothing more.

Yes, it literally does on the internet

How exactly does anonymity not solve that problem?

> If you hold strong believes that can be met harshly by the general public, you better be ready for the pushback and think of ways to make it accepted. That's how it has been done since ever.

The problem is that we're not talking about the general public. Let's say I'm Jewish. Someone on the internet may "doxx" me by finding a group of neonazis and spreading my information there, resulting in me getting threats and hate.

The internet seems to specialize in this sort of "doxxing". Why? My theory is that the internet, even if you have a real name for a handle, still distances and dehumanizes others to the point where it's hard to understand the pain you're causing.

It's hard to walk up and slap someone because you feel the slap and see them wince in pain. It's easy to DM someone on twitter something far more hurtful than a slap, laugh about it with your tribe of neonazis, and forget about it the next day.

That's a good theory. My personal theory is there are a lot of psychopaths and sociopaths in the world, and the internet lets them find each other and form communities that revel in causing misery.

The ideal that "lies can't hurt you, the truth is stronger than lies" has never seemed to actually work. There are countless fictions are far more prominent than facts, and there are countless people who's online experience has been damaged by a small contingent of dedicated attackers.

The response to "harboring free speech to the extreme results in neonazis digitally harassing Jews" should not be "okay, fine, lock your door at night, free speech is more important than you being harassed".

If people believe that it’s wrong for you to be subjected to that, those who do this to you will pay for it.

Anonymity does have uses but it’s powerful and open to misuse. What we see today on the internet is it’s misuse, mostly.

Are you referring to vigilante justice or just trusting the system? (What Americans refer to as the "democratic process" and the "justice system")

Because if it's the former, it takes a lot for people to raise a hand against others outside self-defense.

If it's the latter...the system usually fails. And saying "yeah well eventually, once there's enough political pressure, it won't fail" isn't any consolation to those who are now having to spend thousands of dollars on a therapist to recover from the trauma they've suffered (because American health insurance typically has crap mental health coverage).

Being a total jerk towards you will make them excluded from the society and probably unhireable too.

I think a more accurate statement would be "People are much nicer when their money is at stake." And I don't mean "nicer" as in "genuinely better," it's more "I'll paint on a smile and not say anything bad" (just ask a waiter and they'll have plenty of tales where they had to do this for a tip).

Today, there are plenty of online hangouts for people with all sorts of ideas. This is great since people can easily form communities around a TV show, hobby, etc, but it also enables flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, whose views are often rooted in bigotry (see: All Gas No Brakes video on the flat earth convention [0]). Those communities tend to encourage an "us vs them" mentality and to cut out those who seek to "hold them back" (basically modern cults - alienate yourself from your friends and loved ones, we will provide all the community you need).

In the past, joining groups like the Klan was a much more difficult endeavor (they tended to operate much more in the shadows), and the groups tended to be on the smaller side. Today, it's just a matter of joining a Facebook group about "race realism", "the truth about George Floyd", or whatever, and bam, you have access to thousands of like-minded individuals to build your own personal echo chamber. The traditional tactics of people avoiding those they dislike IRL don't work so well as a form of collective shaming when you've got someone who is terminally online and has tons of people to tell them just how right they are and linking various garbage to reinforce the worldview.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H110vCGvTmM

Free speech is non existent these days. The places that had were invaded by trolls and dabd actors, go shut down one by one after each incident that cost outrage.

My proposition attempts to solve these issues. Don't censor, never delete or ban anything or anyone unless legally required to do so(copyrighted content or illegal porn), hold responsible instead.

I recognise that there's value of anonymity, what I propose is to limit it to the occasions when there's a value.

Oh BTW, if when I say non-anonymous I don't necessarily mean a connection to the government issued legal identity. Using a pseudonym that is the same everywhere but not connected to a government recognised identity should be good enough most of the times. Throwaway accounts are fine when relevant. One person pushing an agenda through multiple accounts is not fine. There can be mechanisms to allow anonymous posting attached to a real identity where doxxing is an option when the person is determined to be a bad actor.

That's only due to selection effects. If being open were the default then they'd be diluted among all the other people. ISPs themselves, (older) reddit, 4chan all serve as examples that the people you don't want to talk to can be mostly siloed off to some corner and you can have your own corner where you can have fun. Things only get problematic once you add amplification mechanisms like twitter and facebook feeds or reddit's frontpage.

> For one thing, it's easy to say 'well we'd only take down illegal content'. But in practice there isn't such a bright line, there's lots of borderline stuff, authorities could rule something posted on your site illegal after the fact- lots of these situations are up to a prosecutor's judgement call. Would you risk jail to push the boundaries?

I don't see how that's an issue? They send a court order, you take down the content is a perfectly reasonable default procedure. For some categories of content there already exist specific laws which require takedown on notification without a court order, which exactly depends on jurisdiction of course, in most places that would be at least copyright takedowns and child porn.

> Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that?

That's pretty much what telcos have to deal with for example. Supposedly 4chan also gets requests from the FBI every now and then. It may be a nuisance, but not some insurmountable obstacle. For big players this shouldn't be an issue and smaller ones will fly under the radar most of the time anyway.

Also, having stricter policies doesn't make those problems go away. People will still post illegal content, but now in addition to dealing with the FBI you also need to deal with moderation policies, psychiatrists for your traumatized moderators (which you're making see that content) and endusers complaining about your policy covering X but not Y or your policy being inconsistently enforced or whatever.

This isn't true at all, and the reddit report following their ban wave is pretty clear about it; once areas that actively established a standard of violent or racist discourse as acceptable were banned, the volume of objectionable material across the site dropped.

4ch had a similar situation, where the culture on /b/, which was intentionally left as an explicitly unmoderated segment of the site, a silo, actively invaded other boards with violent, racist content.

It isn't that people sit in silos and do nothing otherwise - it's that the silos themselves cause people to believe their content is acceptable, then spread that shit everywhere.

Any business with the technical ability to censor what they host is going to be tempted (and likely pressured by other actors) to take down content that people find objectionable. Removing these "chokepoints" where a small number of people have the ability to engage in mass censorship is key if you want to promote more diverse speech on the web. (Not everyone has this goal!)

Maybe there should be more of an effort to reduce peoples' incentive to engage in that sort of behavior in the first place. Why do people join violent extremist groups? Why do people engage with CP? Why do terrorist groups exist? Is it just human nature? Is it a fact that with 7+ billion people we are destined to have millions of people engage in this behavior?

De-platforming horrible material is better than nothing, but it feels like whack-a-mole

In the real world, if no one wants to host you and your group, the standard answer is to acquire money and buy your own land, your own broadcasting, etc. On the internet, this is much harder for 'normal' people to do, requiring them to use services like Google.

Look, once parler was taken down, I purchased several servers off ebay, rented colocation space, and set up my own services. But I have the technical know-how to actually 'own' part of the internet without depending on anyone else. Most people can't really do this. Thus they depend on Google, et al, who are not selling them something akin to a land title, which is what people feel they ought to have, but rather a service.

The reason people got Mad at AWS for taking down parler is because to the common man's mind, when Parler pays for its "website" (because let's be honest, that's as deep as most people go), it 'owns' it, and it ought to be able to hold title to that thing in perpetuity, like land. People felt upset because they felt that amazon simply seized what they perceived to be the equivalent of land or personal property.

Of course websites are different because they require active serving by a computer, and parler was paying AWS to do that and Amazon decided not to. But that's not how people view it.

To top it off, people are scared because they don't know how to own anything on the internet. Even tech savvy people have no idea how to purchase or lease IP space, set up servers, routes, etc. It's all very confusing.

You said you rented colocation space. You (I assume) are paying a monthly fee for an Internet connection for your servers. You are absolutely depending on others who can be pressured just like AWS was with Parler. Don't kid yourself.

It's written in the contract that they can take me offline, but they cannot touch my stuff. They can take it off the shelf for non-payment, but there's a period in which they have to retain it and offer it for pick-up.

This is wholly different than Amazon not only taking parler down, but also deleting the data, forcing them to download terabytes in three days, over a weekend.

And you're still right though. i don't actually own any IP space. In fact, IP space 'ownership' is handled by an NGO with little regulation. That's terrible. It ought to be governmental, because owning parts of the internet is an extremely important part of society. Too important to be left in any non-governmental organization's hands.

There are blockchain like systems that could solve this problem in a distributed fashion. There's also urbit. Or we could have proper governmental authority.

If anything, it's easier since you can own a small plot of land and host a few servers in a building you throw together, instead of having to feed a bunch of people, buy large tracts, build a temple, etc.

Get a metro-e connection, and it doesn't matter how repulsive your legal content is - this isn't some residential connection bringing in <$100/month, they won't drop you until you become a liability (which is basically when the FBI comes knocking) because they make so much money on dedicated lines. (Plus, there's early termination clauses, and the last thing Comcast is going to do is pay that to appease a Twitter mob - what are you gonna do, switch ISPs? This is America, if you're using Comcast, it's probably because the next best thing is DSL.)

And that's just fine. People have the right to be assholes.

In the physical world, if people act badly enough, there will tend to be physical consequences. If someone goes up to a grandmother or little girl or whoever, and starts berating them with vile or threatening speech, they do so at the risk of finding themselves bloodied or worse. Everyone knows this can happen, and unless they are mentally ill, tend to learn at an early age to curtail such behavior behavior before something bad happens to them.

All this has had thousands of years to evolve to the current state, where in most places (at least in the first world), interacting with people in public places is generally pleasant and non-confrontational.

But online, it isn't that way. When there are zero repercussions, things become very unpleasant for all but... well, those assholes.

I get that you prefer such a world, but I don't. How do we work that out? Do we all adopt your way, simply because.... I dunno, I guess because that's what you want?

If Twitter adopted 4chan policies, it would be destroyed financially in short order.

Twitter is pretty loose compared to many of the big social sites. They allow nudity and porn, for example, but of course have rules such as marking it as sensitive. Try that on FB.

It is almost like they adopt polices that help their business. Just like brick and mortar businesses have policies on customer conduct and will ban trouble makers that impact their bottom line.

People have a right to be assholes but everyone else has the right to shun them from polite society.

There is no right to be heard, just to speak and not have the government stomp on you for it. No one else is required to listen or host it.

If I rent out a physical storage unit to you and you use it to run a illegal drug dealing business out of it, would I be liable for that?

I suppose not, which shows that the laws in regards to hosting stuff are off and those should be changed.

If your physical storage unit is consistently used for illegal drug dealing despite several arrests there, and several warnings from law enforcement, then yes you'd probably be liable for that. If you had significant scale of illegal content on Free Speech Drive, then yes you absolutely do face liability. I guess if you think you have a clever legal argument otherwise, you're free to spend $100-500k on a defense attorney to make that argument after your public arrest, while your name comes up online for 'Illegal Content Provider' for all time

It is easy to be an internet tough guy, how about you actually start a simple file server with no restrictions and see how it goes?

Your argument about "worst of humanity" could equally apply to the best of humanity with free speech.

In fact...who are you to decide what is good speech and bad speech?

Why should a company not have the same right on their property?

Stores do. Go to a store and cause a ruckus and watch the ban hammer come down on you after the cops drag you away.

How is Google different from Ma and Pa's Widget Store? At least law enforcement is not involved after most types of bannings from social media.

If that's the case then there's no reasonable discussion to be had here...

A private business is a private business and they can set their rules as they please as long as it doesn't run afoul of laws (ADA in the states for example).

That you think there is some important distinction where Google loses rights that Ma and Pa's store has shows that you have nothing reasonable to offer.

I'm convinced the only way to effectively create free speech on the internet is to tie whatever you say online with personal identification. Not because it will prevent people from saying bad things, but because you could use it to ban people from the internet. (for the record, I think that's a horrible idea... but so is free speech on privately owned servers)

Even worse, imagine there was a technology that allowed you to print those jailbait photos by the thousands and drop them in Times Square. That would be far too dangerous.

Imagine if that technology was used to spread misinformation about the Catholic church.

Ban the printing press! It's too dangerous. It should be controlled by the church and the state!

Even better, get rid of religion and intertwine religious righteousness with politics. Then the state can control it all!

Imagine if there was some kind of website or network that existed for years with barely no rules or enforcement, like image boards that only remove CP or a decentralized anonymizing network with even decentralized payment systems. That would be the end of the world.

We've entered a Golden Age for radical/controversial content- totally unthinkable freedom to say or read anything that would've been technically impossible even in the 80s. It's actually the opposite of censorship- never have people been so free to express any view, thanks to the Internet. I'm not really clear the level of hysteria over Google Drive's policies, specifically- 4chan or another site just like 4chan will always be there

The problem is that (I doubt) Google is really doing this out of some misguided attempt at "protecting" people but rather as a reaction to what they perceive to be what the people want. When America was a very religious (Christian) country, media distributors stayed away from anything that appeared "blasphemous". They didn't necessarily do it because there was a law against it (there were some odd laws here and there, but the media didn't start actually challenging them until religion really fell out of favor), but because they were afraid of consumer reactions. Google (and every other tech company) is doing essentially the same thing here: speaking ill on certain topics is modern-day heresy and they just don't want to be attached to it because they do ultimately fear the consumer.

Even if you found a globally adoptable alternative to google, the same people who pushed Google to ban distribution of "misleading content" would start looking for ways to ban your globally adoptable alternative - at the network level if necessary (look what happened to Parler before they agreed to follow the unwritten rules). At the end of the day, we won't have truly free speech because far too few of us really want truly free speech.

The AUP would be more transparent if it simply banned "modern-day heresy". Folks would then be tagged as tech-heretics, and many would wear that badge with honor.

Calling questionable, unproven, unpopular or ambiguous information "misleading"-- it's a doublespeak. Worse, having my cloud drive spontaneously dumping or blocking my data because some algorithm or faceless reviewer disagrees with the content-- that's totally unacceptable as a consumer proposition. Is my Android phone next simply because I'm posting an HN comment Google might disagree with? Seriously, it's completely unworkable from a consumer position for Google to arrogate to themselves that power.

If you're genuinely interested in convincing people across the aisle to stop trying to ban stuff like this, simply yelling that it's "totally unacceptable as a consumer proposition" and "completely unworkable" and "doublespeak" is barely an argument. Evidently, many consumers are accepting it and will continue to accept it.

I mean...yes that's exactly what they did. Excommunication, run out of town, branded, marked, labeled in public, put in stocks, jailed, killed, yelled at, or just straight ostracized. These are all tactics that have been used in the past to label and punish heretical beliefs. They could absolutely still be used and, if you look at "cancel culture" in the right/wrong light, that's exactly what's still happening.

I agree, I don't think Google is trying to "protect" people. They are ultimately, almost always, protecting their pockets.

Maybe the bar owner isn't trying to "protect" the rest of his customers, he's just trying to maintain a profitable business. Protecting his pockets.

You could apply the same logic to dang, who helps keep HN a pleasant place by doing the same things the bar owner is doing. Yes I imagine he is paid a salary, by the management of YCombinator who see HN as one part of their strategy to make a profit, and therefore his motives are equally cynical.

Ok. Honestly, you can probably reduce all human behavior to such simplistic motives if you want. What I see as someone being kind, you might see as a purely Darwinian strategy to get their genes in future generations.

I'm not all that sure that is a helpful perspective, at least not most of the time.

America is still a very religious country. It's not as bad as it used to be but it's still pretty bad.

Don't forget that these companies are global. Your example is still happening with pictures of Muhammad. Many companies refuse to host or show them for fear of offending Islamic extremists.

For those us not from US, it this "as a reaction to what they perceive to be what the people want." really represent the majority as in your example when America was very religious?

Because it seems to me, ( and I know zip about US ) this action only please half and anger another half?

I think this is why Zuckerberg and some other big players have called for laws to regulate these things, which seems counterintuitive, but then FB can pass the buck and is more likely to maintain the status quo where they're on top. But until they are more insulated from the risks, they're going to be forced to defend themselves.

Disclaimer: I too work for Google

I support regulating these groups but that must be done within the right assigned via the constitution, existing precedent where available, and in depth knowledge of how these companies operate and how the tech influences consumers. It's complicated.

The tragedy isn't in what you've said, but rather what you haven't said. The implication is already that a product of GDocs/GSheets quality should be free, as part of a large company's moat, rather than a paid for product that people will pay for.

The tragic reality is thanks to these large companies turning what would otherwise be successful standalone businesses, into free additional features.

I've used that word because Steve Jobs famously described Dropbox as a feature. Google has effectively made MS Office a feature. Apple effectively made operating systems a feature, by giving away macOS and iOS for free with their hardware sales.

Increasingly, everything becomes a feature, in search of what? For big tech, it's to sell users attention.

Meanwhile, on the other side, big media is charging us to give them our attention...

Hosting as in having some code deployed to some machines is indeed cheap. Keeping a large app like g.docs up and running, especially without breaking the bank, is a bit more tricky.

Of course, that applies to literally every piece of production software ever, but keeping a webpapp running really isn't that hard, it's honestly the bare minimum of competent software development, if you have a team of SREs up at 3am triaging the site every night you're doing something wrong. Now of course, when you get to google scale, you will encounter unique problems, but if you're at google scale your business has more than enough revenue to pay for the costs.

Also, how would you be generating revenue from these users? Just do what google does and run ads on the side? Then what's the difference?

Spinning up containers is like the bare minimum I'd expect from an ops engineer, I wouldn't call it "trivial" but it's the job.

> Also, how would you be generating revenue from these users?

That's a business question, not an engineering one, if the businesses doesn't have a plan for revenue then hosting costs are irrelevant.

Or you have to either have aspirations of becoming a big platform company or a plan to survive and be happy watching big companies push you to fifth place in a category you once dominated.

What you'd need to host/deliver something like Docs/Sheets is: a product team (2 QE, 8 SWEng, 3 SRE, 1 product owner), the product, some cloud infrastructure, and the capital to pay for it. You could go larger than that to build it, but that is plenty of people to run/maintain/support it. Assuming "large scale" is between 1M and 100M users, figure between $750K and $3M for infra. Combine that with median salaries for employees, and you're lookin' at between $1.75M and $4M (before taxes/business fees).

If you use the cheapest infrastructure and labor, you could do it for $500K. (it is mind-blowing how cheap offshore labor is. Google engineers get paid almost 8 times what some of our contractors get paid, for about the same work)

VCs throw that much cash around for a weekend trip to French vineyards. If you can actually get paying customers, even better.

That's the same thing as saying that macOS Monterey isn't Apple's invention, they just copied Xerox.

There's years of development on what Google bought and what Docs suite is now and any engineer that had developed a product for years shouldn't say silly stuff like your sentence.

How naive. The reality is terrible, probably much more than what you can imagine. Let's assume that someone tries to find out teenager victims for cybersex trafficking at a massive scale on your proposed infrastructure with "free-flowing information". How will you stop them from doing so? Is it just a hypothetical scenario? No. This actually happened on Telegram, which refused official government's order to shut down the chatting room on a victim's request.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_room_case

Please don't underestimate how far average people's malice can go. Both private and governmental intervention exist not just because of "good intentions", but it come from the real demands from the society.

It's really not about their "good intentions" but about their self-interest.

It's not about freedom of speech either. Everybody has the right to say whatever they want, and Google has the right not to distribute it. Free markets 101.

The fact that Google has de facto monopoly in some areas is a problem that government needs to deal with.

Whatever pressure they're getting to do this comes from somewhere besides the threat of private civil lawsuits.

I think it would be better to not take proactive filtering based on what they think is misleading and to instead rely on legal judgements to remove info.

Misleading people isn’t illegal (in the US at least, currently). There are situations where it is and that would be a good line for Google to take.

Now I want them to be sued enough times to make them stop doing this.

Why should Google be forced, legally, to carry Chinese state propaganda, for example? Why should Google be forced, legally, to carry ISIS propaganda?

There are alternatives to Google. They should host that content there

We afford monopolies certain privileges, but we also require monopolies to have certain restraints.

Many of these large tech companies have become natural monopolies. I think its reasonable to expect similar restraints.

But regarding limiting these companies from being able to decide which speech they don't want to host: I don't think you've thought this out fully.

What speech should they be forced to host? Art? Disinformation? Propaganda? Porn? Spam? Terrorism? For illegal speech: Whose laws should they be forced to obey?

"No speech should be illegal" - should I be able to threaten people then? That's speech. Should I be able to detail my plans for how I'm going to commit a crime? That's speech.

Should I be able to scream at the top of my lungs in a public space? Should I be able to use a loudspeaker to broadcast my voice (or an advertisement) to drown out all other sound in a public space?

It sounds nice what you're saying, but it's not what you actually believe, so I kindly ask you to argue less in bad faith.

My solution to the original problem would be to make it technologically unfeasible to solve. The architecture of the communication platform should be constrained in such a way that operators & owners are unable to make choices about which speech to include. This is because nobody is equipped to solve this problem, and nobody should be forced to do anything to try and solve it.

As for everything else. You should clearly follow the laws of the country you are doing business in.

Prior to the civil rights act, companies didn’t serve certain people based on their race because they disagreed with that race.

It’s not that Google should be forced to carry stuff, they should be forced to not discriminate because they don’t like it. ISIS propaganda is illegal and should be taken down for that reason.

Bright-line rules like that worry me. This is, a lot of stuff is subjective -- the line between "legal" and "illegal" isn't so clear or immutable as one might naively guess. So if something more binary -- like host-or-remove -- is tied to such a fuzzy, dynamic determinant, it'd seem to give rise to all sorts of problems.

For example, say we forced big companies to host all legal content, but remove all illegal content, and then we want to know if something controversial is legal (e.g., taxes on Bitcoin back when it was newer). Then someone could post two images: one telling people to pay taxes on Bitcoin, and another telling people to not pay taxes on Bitcoin. Then the hosting-company would have to remove exactly one of those. By contrast, a hosting-company could normally just remove stuff they're unsure about because they're not required to host legal content, sparing them the burden of having to properly determine the legality of everything.

Basically, the problem is that we'd be stripping hosting-companies of their freedom to operate in safe-waters, forcing them into murky areas and then opening them up to punishment whenever they fail to correctly navigate those murky waters.

I trust society’s laws for legal/illegal more than Google’s arbitrary decisions of info/misinfo.

It'd probably make them more influential and powerful rather than less, because their judgements would carry the implication of legal-determination, and in popular perception, be law.

They'd essentially be elevated to the status of being lower-courts.

For example: say someone's advertising a new drug of questionable legality (say, Δ-8-THC). Presumably a hosting-company, unsure of legality, would just take that down for violating their policies -- without necessarily asserting that it's illegal.

But if you're proposing that they can't do that, then presumably they'd be forced into making a clear determination on its legality (as they must host it if legal, and must remove it if not). Right?

---

Actually, just to mix crypto in:

Say someone posts a time-locked encrypted-file (a file encrypted such that it'll open after a few hours/days/weeks/months/whatever), and there's reasonable suspicion that it may contain illegal content -- but a hosting-company isn't sure yet, because it was just posted and no one's completed unlocking it yet. Should they be forced to host it?

Now say that an entire community springs up around this: many of the files end up being perfectly legal, while others turn out to be very illegal. How should a hosting-company react?

What specifically is illegal about pro-ISIS speech?

If it’s literally just assholes saying “ISIS is great” then that shouldn’t be taken down. Just like if two ISIS-lovers are IMing each other messages about how much they love ISIS and nothing else illegal it should be allowed. I think.

Similar to how television broadcasters have regulations that that force them to provide equal time to all major candidates.

I think there’s some reasonable threshold that doesn’t require small providers to host everything.

If a private company impacts a nation's states democracy to such an extent that it rivals it in power, they ought to be classified as something else.

I don't think you've thought out the consequences of what you're advocating for.

If you have thought it out, please explain exactly what speech they should be forced to host and what speech they shouldn't be.

Once a company is classified as a public utility (I believe Google is) it should be forced to host all legal content. You tell me what's illegal and I can safely tell you it can't be hosted by Google.

Moreover, you're saying that spam should be forced to be hosted by these companies, just like our snail-mail protects. Even if it takes up Exabytes of information.

Should people who have their content removed be able to sue these companies for removing it?

Just with Twitter, we know that content is regulated by region. Setting your location to Germany will prohibit seeing certain content from the U.S. Many more such regional cases.

The spam example would be a problem, but it's more of an annoyance to solve than a basic human rights case. You simply cannot have a democracy where segments of the population are barred from interacting with public officials online. Especially when public business (advertising, fundraising, making political arguments) is now a core of online communications.

And effectively this would turn these sites into platforms that are so filled with trash they will be unusable. And the chaotic part of me would love to see that happen. But it means basically the end of these companies to function.

Realistically, I think we should keep to the standard we've had in the past: we can't compel companies to host speech they disagree with, and we should take strong measures to limit their anti-competitive behavior and break them up into competing companies if necessary (like we did with telecom)

I would say though, Twitters model from around 2012 was extremely open compared with today (remember the Arab Spring?) and in no way was it an unusable, trash/spam laden platform.

How? Create a cause of action whereby if a tech company removes someone's content, that person can go to court and ask that a judge determine whether that content removal is some kind of anti-spam operation or viewpoint censorship. You don't let the company have the final say.

No, those companies don't have first amendment rights. Commercial speech has always been more limited than personal speech. If the law worked like you claim, common carrier laws for railroads would be unconstitutional because they'd violate railroad company freedom of association. These laws are, in fact, constitutional, and so will be the laws that stop big tech censorship.

Besides: corporations? Rights? Total bullshit. This country ought to be run for the benefit of its citizens, not abstract entities like big tech companies. A corporation is an artificial construct that can exist only because society --- made up of humans --- determines that the corporation is in society's best interest. When a corporation is no longer in the best interest of the humans that make up the world, screw the corporation.

Most average people view YouTube as the defacto video portal of the entire internet.

Yes it is. Youtube is a huge conduit for communication.

Imagine if ABC banned a candidate. The argument that there’s still CBS and NBC are available is not relevant as a major media outlet is favoring a candidate by blocking their opponents.

For small outlets it’s not an issue. But YouTube is the biggest video provider on the planet, not allowing a political candidate would be detrimental to democracy.

Even if that candidate said stupid stuff like “world is flat.” People have to make their decision and as long as we’re a democracy, that choice should be individual.

If you don't have a big enough chance at winning, you don't go to debates

Mind you, news networks recently had a very strong preference towards the incumbent president, aligning their news to match the president's talking points, and having nightly calls to align their messages

They only air debates from candidates that meet some shared threshold.

Once the candidates are locked in, they can’t give preferential air time to one over the other.

And your true intentions come out.

If Google delists AOC from all their properties in the next election and replaces the results with those from her opposition, I'm sure you'll be the first to say it's totally fine and she should just host her own search site if she doesn't like it.

They already do host them. CloudFlare, the biggest CDN, despite their words and claims routinely censors sites meanwhile defending hosting terrorist site's free speech.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90312063/how-cloudflare-straddle...

> the company serves at least seven groups on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), al-Quds Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Hamas.

> CEP has sent letters to Cloudflare since February 13, 2017, warning about clients on the service, including Hamas, the Taliban, the PFLP, and the Nordic Resistance Movement. The latest letter, from February 15, 2019, warns of what CEP identified as three pro-ISIS propaganda websites.

CF claims terrorist organization's websites are free speech:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-free-speech/

As for the whole "private speech" argument, so, Rosa Parks should have just started her own bus company too? Discriminating against people based on race was legal after all. And if race is a "different" topic, then how about religion? Religion is based on ideas. These tech companies claim to censor religion based offensive content too. But almost all LGBT content is against all religion. Isn't that offensive too and should be censored too? And just like religion is based on ideas, political opinions are ideas too.

Railroads, telecom, electricity and water companies should be able to refuse service too?

Are you against the FDA, EPA, FCC, FEC, COPPA regulations, regulations of fire insurance rates etc?

How about Net Neutrality? Private businesses should be able to charge whatever they want and for whatever content they want right?

How about the government-forced lockdowns forcing private businesses to shut down and go bankrupt?

And how about the baker who refused to bake cake for the gay couple for religious reasons?

How about the current Administration banning menthol cigarettes, flavoured cigars?

How about government banning incandescent light bulbs?

How about Fauci's emails where he's emailing with Zuckerberg (some of which was also redacted). Fauci is the government and him working together with FB in building their "COVID dashboard" which censored many people, especially those talking about the lab leak theory as well as Ivermectin. Is that not government enforced censorship?

There's a whole community on TikTok (you can find them here on Twitter, too) which scorns people as "fatphobic" for encouraging fitness and weight loss. They falsely say obesity isn't unhealthy. Should that be allowed considering that's also "misleading/misinformation"? Are social media companies that allow it "killing people" (Biden's words from today)? Are social media companies also guilty of "killing people" if they allow content encouraging people to be obese, to consume fatty junk food, content which glorifies cigarette smoking and large amounts of alcohol consumption and a sedentary lifestyle?

Seems like the "it's a private business" crowd is totally okay with government enforced regulations and lockdowns for their political benefit but when it comes to political speech of their opposition, they suddenly discover the "private" business.

SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas opined couple months ago discussing big tech censorship quite extensively. The case was regarding whether President Trump was allowed to block people on Twitter and it being a 1st amendment violation. While the case was declared moot as President Trump left office, Justice Clarence Thomas took the opportunity to discuss censorship. How politicians like President Trump aren't allowed to block users on big tech but big tech is able to block and ban government employees and how this creates a weird power dynamic. Here's a few excerpts:

> "But whatever may be said of other industries, there is clear historical precedent for regulating transportation and communications networks in a similar manner as traditional common carriers. Candeub 398–405. Telegraphs, for example, because they “resemble[d] railroad companies and other common carriers,” were “bound to serve all customers alike, without discrimination." ... "Internet platforms of course have their own First Amendment interests, but regulations that might affect speech are valid if they would have been permissible at the time of the founding. See United States v. Stevens, 559 U. S. 460, 468 (2010). The long history in this country and in England of restricting the exclusion right of common carriers and places of public accommodation may save similar regulations today from triggering heightened scrutiny—especially where a restriction would not prohibit the company from speaking or force the company to endorse the speech." ... "The similarities between some digital platforms and common carriers or places of public accommodation may give legislators strong arguments for similarly regulating digital platforms. [I]t stands to reason that if Congress may demand that telephone companies operate as common carriers, it can ask the same of ”digital platforms." ... "For example, although a “private entity is not ordinarily constrained by the First Amendment,” Halleck, 587 U. S., at ___, ___ (slip op., at 6, 9), it is if the government coerces or induces it to take action the government itself would not be permitted to do, such as censor expression of a lawful viewpoint. Ibid. Consider government threats. “People do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around.” Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U. S. 58, 68 (1963). The government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly. See ibid.; Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U. S. 991, 1004–1005 (1982). Under this doctrine, plaintiffs might have colorable claims against a digital plat- form if it took adverse action against them in response to government threats. The Second Circuit feared that then-President Trump cut off speech by using the features that Twitter made available to him. But if the aim is to ensure that speech is not smoth- ered, then the more glaring concern must perforce be the dominant digital platforms themselves."

> "As Twitter made clear, the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms. The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the First Amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified raise interesting and important questions. This petition, unfortunately, affords us no opportunity to confront them."

The last 2 points are important as Justice Thomas is basically saying "give us a case which brings up these two questions and then we will have a deep look."

I would highly recommend reading his opinion:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/20-197_5ie6.pdf

One can even cite Amazon's recent censorship of SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas's own documentary as well as Eli Steele’s documentary as examples:

https://archive.is/aNv3B

Also based on recent revelations of things like Press Secretary Psaki admitting that they are flagging content *FOR* Facebook, advocating for censoring any person from all social media if they are censored on only one social media as well as Fauci's emails showing him actively emailing with Zuckerberg on the COVID news which led to censoring of anyone who brought up the lab leak theory, this makes these companies State actions and not private companies.

Do they routinely censor? As far as I can tell they do not 'routinely' do this. As a matter of course, they routinely do the opposite. There are only two examples I can think of where they have censored.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...

It was later found to be true: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hunter-biden-laptop-is-real...

Advertisers (and governments and criminals) pay handsomely for surveillance-driven "free" platforms, but who will pay for the development, maintenance, productization, polish, and support of open decentralized alternatives? Users have been conditioned to believe that software should be free, and the more ideological people in the FOSS movement will tell you it's "not open source" if you don't give it away with no strings attached. I know people who will actually uninstall things if they do not have an OSI-compliant license.

Look at how much work it takes to develop and maintain these centralized systems. Now consider that decentralized systems are more challenging to develop and scale because you have to deeply understand distributed systems instead of just hacking some code to run on one centrally managed 100% trusted platform.

Where is the army of independently wealthy highly skilled developers who are going to do all this unpaid?

I am not optimistic. Nobody pays for freedom, openness, or privacy. All the money and momentum is behind the current user-exploiting paradigm, and now we have a generation of programmers who are learning "cloud native" development and don't even know how to develop things that don't run this way.

Edit:

I once gave a presentation to a room of college kids and was discussing a peer to peer system. A student raised his hand and asked how two devices could communicate this way without "a cloud." He was not aware that it was possible for something to communicate directly with something else over a network without a server.

[1]: https://gitcoin.co/

(Obligatory disclaimer pre-acknowledging the drive-by comments when mentioning anything crypto on HN: yes there are lots of scams, yes lots of illegal activity uses these networks, yes blockchain is often used as a buzzword)

It's the "bad neighborhood effect." A few people commit crimes, so a neighborhood becomes known as "bad." The people who don't commit crimes move out. Now most of the neighborhood's residents are criminals.

A lot of financial regulation is about maintaining the reputation of markets so that serious people will use them. If too many scams, bubbles, and other nonsense goes down, the market gets an overall bad reputation.

Decentralization allows anyone to start their own bubble with however much curation they want. If you want crypto without scams, it's very easy to achieve. Let's not forget how terrible a reputation the whole "world wide web" had just 2 decades ago, and yet here we are complaining how locked-down and ultimately "too safe" it has become.

The space will change with more regard for fundamental aspects of the platforms' technology, than transient feelings about its current ecosystem.

I don't know, I pay for O365. I know a lot of people that do. And remember; Google Drive is not free either. To get more than a minimal amount of storage you have to pay. As a result, most serious users of these services are already paying for them.

However, we end up paying AND keep getting judgement on our data. It really should be E2E encrypted and these conditions should only apply for files that are actually shared with external people.

However, I've heard many stories of people getting their accounts banned for having copyrighted content on their drive that was never shared at any point.

If it wasn't for the fact that I mainly have O365 for other stuff (email in particular), I would never pay for OneDrive under these conditions. Imagine your computer suddenly going like "oh hey this is a downloaded movie, you shouldn't have this!!" and deleting it from its harddrive. Or worse, even forbidding you to log in and access any of your data.

Ridiculous of course but this is the situation we now have with online storage. I back my OneDrive up every day for this reason.

Do Google Drive Terms now prohibit encryption?

Nothing once you get basic use of a computer dowm is more important than an understanding of networking.

Providers can cut you out, but if you know networking, it becomes much harder for you to be stopped or cut off.

Hell always comes when people feel they know what's best for everyone else, and attempt to forcibly implement it.

I'm for people being free to choose what they believe their own individual self interest is. Even if it isn't what others imagine it to be. Even if those others are right.

Who's going to pay for and operate it? And why won't they be subject to the same pressures that got us here?

To be honest, it would be a challange, but totally doable.

Decetralize the interenet once again!

"How do we limit the harm of misinformation while preserving our freedoms?" That's a political problem. We can't just code our way out.

The best way to push back on this is not some p2p techno fix. It's to systematically start firing anyone in an organization who demands the moral cleansing of customers or colleagues.

What we really need is a legal designation of a "public square" online that protects free speech online

I, for one, don't think the US government should be in charge of Twitter.

Taking private companies and forcing them to say certain things is not how I'd like this country to evolve, and as long as the 1st Amendment exists, is not how it will evolve. "Public Square" designations for private companies cannot exist alongside the 1st Amendment, period.

Although with the increasing use of private gaming servers and streaming, ISP’s are starting to acommadate the gen_pop with decent upload bandwith finally.

Who know, it wont be long untill ISP’s start filtering content on a massive scale.

Yes! And the way we do it is simple: amend the US Constitution to abolish copyright and patents and ensure people have the right to intellectual freedom.

https://reddit.com/r/ifa

Because if it's the former, then yeah Google itself needs to be replicated and provided for all humanity. If it's the latter, well what does FTP not have?

I'm having a very hard time seeing how one specific implementation of any technology becomes so important that to live without it is to be deprived of a human right.

If I can ask this in a non-snarky way, did you ever honestly[1] think working on ads was contributing to a better world? If so, how?

[1] 'honestly' contrasted with "it pays well so I'm not going to think about that" or "I say it does in public but I don't believe it".

Google's job is to take away the motivation to do this work.

Alernatively, if it looks like someone is doing it, hire or acquire them.

https://workspace.google.com/terms/use_policy.html

In particular

    You agree not to, and not to allow third parties or Your End Users, to use the Services:

    to intentionally distribute hoaxes, or other items of a destructive or deceptive nature;

    Your failure to comply with the AUP may result in suspension or termination, or both, of the Services pursuant to the Agreement.

If, e.g., businesses and other organisations were potentially upset about Gmail scanning (remember Google was sued for this and lost) then that dissatisfaction argubaly provides motivation to avoid Gmail.

That motivation could potentially spread outside of businesses and other organisations. Google's job is to take away such motivation.

Arguably Google Workspaces is Google doing its job of quelling a potential uprising, so to speak. They are taking away potential motivation to innovate away from Google and online advertising. (It also highlights the inherent flaws in a "free" services model. For many businesses and organisations, this is not acceptable.)

Meanwhile, the company's core business remains unchanged: providing services for "free" while generating billions in profits through online advertising services.

I host my own email and pay about a dollar a month and my non-tech family members look at me like I'm some fool for not using the free stuff. Conversations about the value of data just go woosh over their heads :|

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s... https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Collection:SaaSS https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

If you want a totally free and open source alternative to Facebook and Google, that you can run on your own servers, you can find it here:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

Putting aside intent, cost etc. What can / should these companies do that'll make everyone happy?

As for Google, I've given up on anything revolutionary from them. They have a lot of smart people with good ideas but they've grown so big that they can't "move fast and break things" without breaking whole sectors of the economy--and given the number of anti-trust suits Google is embroiled in, I think the governments of the world know it. That said, Google generally seems to at least try to do the right thing, even if no one there seems to know exactly what that is.

https://ipfs.io

I'm pretty sure Facebook and Twitter aren't far behind in the pursuit of also actively banning content they deem misleading. I don't think it's a Google-specific problem.

Implementation would be easy if we knew how to solve payments for decentralized hosting, maybe with ads as a possible business model. And the payments brokers mustn't be the central points either.

They don't want BS that is harming everyone on their property.

I would ban the same on my property.

That said, there is no reason to ever use Google. Nothing they offer is so critical that you must use them.

I don't use Google for anything and never will because they are a spyware company.

You willingly work for a spyware company and are trying to claim personal morals? How does that work in your mind? Genuinely curious.

> We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information.

How does that work?

Who pays for it?

Who manages it?

You realize that would create a de facto government if an actual government wasn't running it.

Look at any website that has truly "free-flowing information".

They all end up being a cesspool filled with racists, sovcits, terrorists, and pedophiles.

Even places like Kiwifams has rules and deletes posts and bans users that violates their few rules.

I intuitively I agree with you, but can you provide sources so next time someone argues against it I can back up that claim better?

They’re the only ones I’ve seen that seem to have hit on a reasonable trade off to fix the common issues around federated services (simple administration, keeping versions in sync, first class network between users etc.)

The functional OS design is really cool too - I think it has potential to solve a lot of these issues.

I don’t really care that Google is removing dumb content from their services, but I agree that computing can be a lot more than it is. Users have lost ownership over their own compute. We have PCs, but everything is in the browser on someone else’s servers. Urbit is cool because it’s a way to get that ownership back.

This is the problem. We have arrived where we are because some group of people think that powerful companies "should make the world better".

Historically, much of the major atrocities were carried out with these very intentions.

How to build a tyrant in one simple lesson: 1) Take any normal person who wants to make the world better 2) Give them the power to do so

I sure as hell don't want to do it.

Without that we're just choosing between which monarchy to rule us.

But not enough to have stopped you from joining in the first place or contributing your time in exchange for salary.

It’s also not clear to me what these alternatives should do differently. Should they just host anything as long as it’s not illegal? I just read an article today about how social media is killing people by spreading vaccine misinformation. So they’re going to get pressured anyways, just from a different source.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

A paradise of moral paladins seems to be Twitter, deliberately designed to stoke tensions and dissuade people from reasoning.

That is exactly what's needed.

When there's no penalty for bullshit, lies tend to self-perpetuate, like viruses.

You may be fixated right now on some half-baked ideal of "free speech" and so on, but the fact is - a lot of people out there can't tell left from right. And in situations such as the current pandemic, when the consequences of spreading bullshit are thousands of deaths, your naive ideas about "freedom" need a reality check.

> truly free-flowing information

Which will then immediately get hijacked by bullshit-spewing AI bots and folks with agendas. See what happened recently with all the "freedom" emphasizing social networks.

What you're proposing is the online equivalent of a country with no military, no police, no laws and no judicial system. This may be fine in some Ayn Rand fanfic novel for young adults, but it's not a reality where anyone would want to live.

As long as a speech is said in a private place (e.gr. Google’s servers, facebook’s…) it is subject to money. It will never be free because it is not “public”.

For Docs for example: Sure, from a technical standpoint, creating a webapp that lets you modify a document, syncs over new changes on a regular basis, and lets multiple users collaborate on the same doc and the same time is certainly harder than making a hello world calculator, but it's definitely not that hard. Most of us could figure out how to do it, especially since it's 2021 and our hardware is up to the task.

However, what is stupidly non-easy, is getting billions of people to use your solution, and for it to become the "standard" in society, for powerusers and non-powerusers alike, and for it not to have hiccups when a billion people use it. Oh, also, you need to somehow pay for the physical infrastructure that supports it, and the human beings that maintain it (hardware + software).

The situation would be even more complicated for YouTube because of the nature of the content, i.e. a single video on YouTube might be viewed by billions of people, while even the most popular docs are viewed by thousands at most, and even then making a copy of a text document to then distribute off-platform is pretty trivial.

And yes, we can spit out terms like blockchain w/ proof of stake, IPFS, etc. - but the tech isn't even the hard part, it's everything else that's hard (adoption, consensus, complexity for non-powerusers, funding, etc.)

Economies of scale and network effects.

Nothing has to be the standard. But if 80% of people are familiar with X, choosing Y incurs friction.

For instance, there is an enormous benefit to the entire world from using a standard IP/TCP stack. Yet, we don't seem to suffer from a centralized authority making controversial or conflict-of-interest decisions regarding that stack.

So what I was suggesting is that document-editing abide by some global protocol/standard, which would include storage, versioning, and permissions. As far as the choice of user-facing interfaces and implementations of logic around those standards, there need not be just one, or even a few. Everyone can bring something cool to the table and anyone can use whichever flavor they wish.

It's a solution that works for anyone with basic IT skills. Offer your extended family access, and use the provided software to control permissions etc

Sure you could build your own. But how would you finance the maintenance of your software and its free-for-customers delivery platform? Answer: By either selling advertisement, or by charging people for using it.

The problem really is that by now Google has monopoly. Therefore it is difficult or impossible for you to compete with them.

Google is already non-neutral... they ban all sorts of content on search and comply with law in multiple countries. It's never a question of "Should Google be neutral," but instead "How neutral."

I’m sorry but they can stay neutral by just not reading/blocking people’s Docs

They can “stay neutral” by limiting the ability to share widely. Free speech doesn’t mean that you are entitled to a billboard, radio station, or global content delivery network.

By aligning global distribution with easy content marketing, Google, Facebook, etc created a monstrosity that encourages the worst content and systematically evicerates high quality content.

That fundamental lack of understanding by naive engineers drives a lot of the problems we have.

What has any of this got to do with Google Drive?

No it isn’t.

> A document flagged as "Share with link" is reliably hosted worldwide.

Just like any other piece of content online.

Are you saying all online content should be subject to censorship just because it can be accessed worldwide?

I'm afraid I don't follow. In what way does it differ?

> Are you saying all online content should be subject to censorship just because it can be accessed worldwide?

I'm saying no CDN is obligated to vend content in violation of its TOS. Content available at drive.google.com is quite different from content hosted at your-site.com: you control the content at the latter. It's your TOS to enforce there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network

> I'm saying no CDN is obligated to vend content in violation of its TOS.

Of course private businesses can choose the terms they operate under. It’s Google’s choices that people are criticizing.

Pretending Google Drive is like a billboard is dishonest.

We are talking about a file sharing service used for collaboration by individuals and businesses.

It’s Orwellian for the content of such a service to be monitored. It would be like AT&T disconnecting calls if certain topics were discussed.

> We're talking about a file sharing service used for collaboration

That's one way to use it. Another way is to cheaply host content and then post the link to Facebook or Twitter. It seems Google is reserving the right to not support that use case.

> It would be like AT&T disconnecting calls

Private calls are a different model from a public & shared link. It's a bit more more like a television station cutting a live broadcast if the person on screen starts sweating a blue streak. Though that analogy is also not perfect... Hosted publicly-accessible documents are kind of their own thing. It's not regulated as a common carrier and it's also not a newspaper.

It accurately describes a piece of infrastructure that many (if not most major) services including drive use.

It does not describe drive, but it’s a moot point since there is nothing relevant about calling drive a CDN.

> Private calls are a different model from a public & shared link.

Not at all. There is nothing stopping a phone call being made to a radio station, or placed on speaker to an audience of multiple people. This is analogous to the use case of posting a link to Twitter or a Facebook group.

This is actually an excellent demonstration of why phone calls are a poor analogy for publicized Drive links: in the scenario that you describe, if the radio station has not gotten the consent of the caller to broadcast the call or the circumstances don't suggest the call will be broadcast (such as if someone calls the station's customer complaints line and that line is patched inappropriately into the broadcast circuits), in most states (and under FEC guidelines) the radio station could be held legally liable for violating the caller's privacy.

No such law exists for a Google drive document link.

Shared documents are their own thing and previous models don't really precisely fit them. There isn't really any precedent to say that Google's position here is wrong; arguments by analogy break down quickly. A Drive document can be used as a private scratch pad, a multi-user scratch space, or as a stored read-only piece of data intended for broad dissemination on a reliable content network; the technology doesn't distinguish the use cases, and Google applies more or less the same policies to all of them.

That’s weirdly irrelevant.

> There isn't really any precedent to say that Google's position here is wrong

You don’t need a legal precedent to determine what is wrong. You are making the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent here.

> the technology doesn't distinguish the use cases, and Google applies more or less the same policies to all of them.

That’s the reason this is a problem.

You have conceded that Google’s restrictions on what you can share affect all kinds of collaboration.

[Edit: your comment changed after I posted mine]

Oh, if your primary concern is that Google reserves the right to get into private collaborations and modify access to those documents, that's something other than what I'm arguing. I'm personally ambivalent (their house and their rules... If you don't like the rules don't live in the house), but I can see why people would have more concern with that situation than the situation where they block wide-cast sharing via a view-only link.

You don’t need a legal precedent to determine what is wrong. You are making the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent here.

> Oh, if your primary concern is that Google reserves the right to get into private collaborations and modify access to those documents, that's something other than what I'm arguing.

They do, and ok.

> I'm personally ambivalent (their house and their rules... If you don't like the rules don't live in the house)

This is a sentiment that I generally agree with as life advice, but is a non-contribution to these kinds of discussion.

> but I can see why people would have more concern with that situation than the situation where they block wide-cast sharing via a view-only link.

There is no difference between a small scale collaboration and what you have chosen to label a ‘wide-cast’ link, other than how many people read the document.

When you have a reach like Google, neutrality isn't an option. And their mission isn't neutrality anyway; it's "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Dangerous misinformation coming from a google dot com domain isn't useful.

To be a good liberal, Google has to decide if it's a publisher or platform. IF it's a publisher, then the hateful content is coming from them and they must take editorial control of google docs and whatnot. If they're a platform provider, then they get the same protections as telephone network operators and others from the actions of their users.

This current situation is the start of the road to tyranny.

>This current situation is the start of the road to tyranny.

I'm not a historian, but I can't think of many examples where an evil regime gained power by slowly "boiling the frog" and gradually eroding free speech rights.

Communist dictators typically seized power in a violent revolution spurred on by deliberate misinformation campaigns.

Many of the Middle-Eastern dictators seized power in a not-so violent revolution (at least, not violent enough to cause a full-scale civil war) spurred on by deliberate misinformation campaigns.

The colonial powers maintained their grip on power by denying education to the natives, and when they left the dictators that took their place seized power by violence even in a Western legal framework.

Maybe the Nazis did this (I'm honestly not sure), and maybe Julius Caesar too? But this doesn't seem to be a set-in-stone, guaranteed way of seizing power.

These companies are choosing to repeat what people tell them. They should always be considerate when doing so.

Picking operators who's opinions align with yours is the liberal way, using the free market to pick which ideas get repeated

It’s when google decides to block things that aren’t illegal that they get into the weeds, and companies framing opinions they disagree with as “Dangerous misinformation” is itself dangerous misinformation, and a net negative on society.

Google should not be arbitrating truth. They are not qualified, not capable, and not honest enough to do it, and they will never be.

I don’t know a single person in real life I would trust to censor what I can and can’t see, and I trust google much less than those people I actually know.

this isn't Google's problem. It's a society level problem. Google is just responding to the pressure

Google doesn’t want to eliminate its cash cow, and doesn’t want to be associated with crazy fringe people. It’s pretty simple really.

Running this stuff through a “liberal” or “conservative” lens isn’t productive. Big public companies care about making money and eliminating risks associated with doing so.

Big companies aren't at risk from losing money for quashing unpopular speech - it's exactly why unpopular speech is the speech that generally needs protecting.

I think being credited with empowering right wing nuts can blowback though.

Are nazis marching near the homes of holocaust survivors disgusting? Sure. But there's a reason why it should be allowed if you and your children and their children are going to experience fundamental freedom instead of the arbitrary wishes of a government that may replace this one or the next one or the next one.

extrapolate from there.

Google Drive is a private resource, not an avenue in Milwaukee. Google is not the government.

You have the freedom to speak, but not in a newspaper you don’t own. You have the freedom to assemble, but not in a privately owned shopping mall.

You are technically correct based on current legal precedent but only because of the government's failure to regulate these companies not because it's inherently so.

If Milwaukee had been a company town they would still have been required to allow it, but because of weak politicians failing to ensure free speech is preserved we have arrived at a point where Mark Zuckerberg or Google's trust and safety team can arbitrarily ban speech for billions without any consequence or legal challenge.

Meanwhile just the other day the white House spokesperson was asking why if someone is banned on one platform they aren't banned on all of them automatically. If you don't see this dystopian future just over the hill you never will until it's too late.

If so, that puts the entire search apparatus in the category of "censorship," since it makes opinionated decisions regarding what the answer to your query should be. Choosing to refrain from vending a Drive URL is basically the same thing.

Edit: I could see an argument that they're being a bad steward of other people's data if they choose not to honor share requests on content they host or choose to remove content they've previously hosted. In which case, I'm glad they're putting the fact they'll do that right in a public disclosure, and it is something people should consider when choosing Drive to host their content.

Six months ago saying covid-19 originated in a lab was verboten on many platforms - saying it on facebook or YouTube would get you called a purveyor of misinformation and the content deleted and and your account at risk.

Suddenly it turns out the people involved at the government level funded the work exactly, and they worked with these companies to define what was misinformation, and suddenly Jon Stewart is making jokes about it and these companies allow it to be talked about again.

If you don’t understand how dangerous the platforms that house our public speech banning some speech based on “misinformation” is you aren’t paying any attention. They have set up their systems to detect/downrank/remove arbitrary content and that will be used for political reasons - it already has been and quite recently.

We live in dangerous times and a lot of people are oblivious.

Barnes and Noble isn’t censoring anyone because it chooses to feature some books on an end cap vs. buried on the shelf.