> Edit: keep bringing those freethinker(tm) downvotes. It won't change the law one bit, but I guess it gives good feels.

Freedom to comment is not freedom to not be downvoted into oblivion. You can complain but we'll grey that one, as well. There's lesson in the irony.

And yet still not a single counter argument explaining why you guys don't build your own social media site instead of whining about the old and stupid leading brands. There's lesson in the irony.

They keep trying to build their own social media sites and are confused as to why they all degenerate into cesspools.

Yeah, there is no limit to new social sites, there is a limit to ones which work.

Us guys?

You're making a lot of assumptions. One of the saddest and most frustrating aspects of big tech's narrowing of permissible discourse is the association of defenders of discourse with red ties, right wing ideas and all of that.

An Intro to Constitutional Law course or book would demonstrate how false that is, that up until only a decade or less ago, conservatives were the ones assaulting free speech. And Progressives were vigorously defending freedom of speech. This includes hate speech. They were preventing 'consequences' as people like yourself like to remind us we have no protection from. I can suggest materials to read, but what has degenerated is this thread, so it's pointless effort unless someone wants it.

The philosophical arguments made by the Progressives in those days in defense of speech resonate timelessly, from the 1600s to the 2020s. The arguments resonate also beyond narrow ideas of what constitutes government restrictions.

Today the question is around whether the FB's and Twitter's and YouTube's should be regulated as utilities and in the public interest, rather than an outmoded ideal around private ownership rights and the 1st Amendment not applying. From misinformation to viewpoint discrimination, it's the real question of our present time.

Cool, how about some specific references to settled cases that are relevant to the situation rather than vague references to law books?

Back in the day, I remember how Tipper Gore was all about warning us of the dangers of explicit lyrics and videos and she wasn't a conservative or have I lost track of who's on which team?

Disliking what became of one political party because of the embrace of a demagogue does not necessarily make one a strong adherent of the other leading brand or is that too nuanced for you?

I support the rights of social media sites to moderate content as they see fit and I support the rights of their customers to take their business elsewhere if they don't like how it's run. I won't be going into Hobby Lobby anytime soon nor will I be going to Carl's Jr, but I'm also not going to tell them how to run their businesses. I think that's where we really differ here. Facebook and Twitter will ultimately fall to superior successors that catch the zeitgeist just like they did. But not on any of our schedules.

> Back in the day, I remember how Tipper Gore was all about warning us of the dangers of explicit lyrics and videos and she wasn't a conservative

Al Gore was long known as a conservative Democrat, and his taking up his wife's singular political issue was in line with that; in fact the WSJ complained about his supposed reinvention as a liberal in 2000 during the campaign. (Weirdly, complaining that he had done so in aligning with Clinton, who also was, even as President, a conservative Democrat; this was a partisan campaign hitpiece more than anything, Gore’s actual reinvention as anything but a conservative Democrat didn't really happen until after he was out of electoral politics, when he became a single-issue campaigner on climate change.)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB966909158678552096

Hobby Lobby I know, but why not Carl's Jr?

Edit: Ah, I see the founder (who died in 2008) donated and supported anti-gay causes and anti-abortion

I have no problem with social media companies kicking off anyone they please. I do have a problem when the lines between government and private get blurred, and a government can indirectly or directly influence the censorship decisions of private companies through threat of regulation, a revolving door, or by explicitly flagging certain posts. That's a grey area 1A violation in my mind.

When has any of this not been blurry?

Tech gets all sorts of tax breaks to innovate. That's okay, but if they proactively kick people off the platform so as to head off government regulation, that's not okay?

Or wait, let me guess, all tax breaks are good! How'd I do?

No, it's definitely not okay for a government to threaten a private company (through which most public discourse flows) into censoring its political opponents. It is no different in practice to a 1A violation.

The extent to which this happens at all can be debated. But the principle of the matter should be clear, if it is shown to be happening, it is certainly morally wrong, it's anti-democracy and (although it's difficult to prove in court) perhaps unconstitutional.

Here's an example of the grey area I'm taking about in my previous post. The executive branch is flagging posts for "COVID misinformation" to Facebook. We don't know who is doing the flagging or what criteria they're employing, and Facebook has an incentive to comply with the take-down requests so as to avoid potential costly regulation. The sum total of this is the government censoring speech (well, there's one layer of indirection, which is a compliant and scared Facebook) in a way that's completely unaccountable and not auditable.

That's funny, I didn't hear any of this righteous self indignation during the last administration over its bogus antitrust threats. Were those okay with you or did it take you this long to work up a really good lather?

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/05/trump-looking-into-antitrust...

This is presumptive whataboutism with fairly incendiary language. You don't know my views on this question and have lumped me in with am amorphous blob you've labelled "conservative". You might be surprised to learn that I am not against social media censoring hate speech, for example.

For the record, what Trump was doing was clearly authoritarian and had the intention of controlling moderation decisions on these platforms. It was anti-democratic and awful due to its underlying intentions. Ron DeSantis is trying a similar thing to Ben and Jerry's now.

However, I was and remain less concerned by this than I am with the influence of the Democratic Party on tech firms, mainly because the Republicans have so little influence despite the threats. You can see the power asymmetry (and revolving door) on display through a single example, the censorship of the Hunter Biden story on the eve of the election.

They didn't censor it, for nothing really significant has come of it since other than he was exploiting existing law for his own personal gain. So they decided to mostly ignore Giuliani's fantastical tales of the stolen laptop. Seems like a good call to me. Imagine a congress willing to work together to change the laws to make what he did illegal in the future though. That's how things used to mostly work IMO.

We seem to be in a quarterly pandemic wave cycle right now and it's overwhelming our healthcare system and it's killing Americans and ultimately depressing the economy. Given all the changes and adaptations we made as a society post 9/11, attempting to control the flow of covid disinfo seems minimal to me. And it's easy to criticize our leaders. But just like a true first amendment zealot should build their own social media site centered around the first amendment to find out why that's impractical, try leading this country when it's on a course to be an indefinite pandemic purgatory.

But you raise a valid point. I'm very concerned with YouTube's slut shaming through demonetization of Naomi Wu's YouTube channel. It's not a good look for them but then very little is these days.

They did censor the original New York Post story. The media chose to ignore it, but the social media companies were censoring any links to the story, actively encouraged by Democratic Party operatives such as Schiff who were falsely labelling it as Russian disinformation and encouraging a blackout. This has potentially election moving consequences, so coercive Democratic influence over social media is absolutely a real threat to democracy.

Regarding your comment about a 1A-friendly platform, I don't advocate for a censorship-less social media platform. It's stupid on its face. But moderation should either be voluntary with no coercive influence of government (whether that influence is achieved by carrot or stick), or it should be defined by the legislative body (hate speech laws) instead of implied threat of regulation or via the executive branch.

Regarding the flagging of COVID misinformation, that's fairly lower on my list of worries, and it's not that I don't favor removing that toxic information, it's that the executive branch is the one coordinating it. The encouragement of political censorship (the Hunter Biden case above) is much higher on my list of concerns and much more directly anti-democratic.

And then they reversed their censorship. It's hard to make perfect decisions in real time. The information got out there, it was bogus, and they faced criticism for doing it in the first place.

So they chose to eliminate its effect on the election based (I would assume) on the bogus stuff about Hillary's email server four years earlier. And if this is the end of October surprises I can only say good riddance, but it probably won't be.

Try walking a mile in their shoes before holding them accountable to infallible behavior is my only suggestion here.

We're going to have to disagree about a first amendment friendly platform. I'm a huge fan of letting the marketplace of ideas work these things out lawsuits and all. I 100% expect a dumpster fire every single time, but then most tech companies end up dumpster fires anyway so why not? There's probably some epsilon incremental revenue pulling this off and capturing the single digit percentage audience that demands these things, no?

If Twitter's moderation team made that decision because they genuinely thought it was Russia disinfo, then I have no problem with it. But the waters are so muddied when we have a chorus of policymakers applying pressure and encouraging that decision, both through the rhetoric in that moment and leading up to it. It's that kind of behavior/rhetoric (similar to Trump's anti-trust threats) which is the threat to democracy, not the decision itself in the abstract which may have been perfectly defensible.

I can only conclude that Schiff et al were being intentionally dishonest about the Russian disinfo line in an attempt to apply the maximum amount of influence at the most critical time before the election. It was a cynical attempt by elected officials to sway an election through censorship. They knew it wasn't Russian disinfo at the time. Joe Biden's own comments revealed that knowledge about a day into the saga.

> Edit: keep bringing those freethinker(tm) downvotes

Sauce. Goose.

Edit: Maybe you should start your own tech news site. Or if that's too hard, why don't you apply to work at YC and work your way up to a position where you control the moderation for this site?

Once again: Sauce. Goose.

You're assuming I'm not okay with the content moderation of Hacker News. You should never assume.

If anything you should jump with joy at the rights of people who disagree with this article to flag it and at your right to register discontent without any substantive argument as to why you are registering your discontent with but a simple down vote.

That's freedom of speech in action! And while my tone here is sarcastic, I believe sincerely that this moderation system is currently superior to any of the ham fisted bad AI deployed on either of the two leading social media sites.

I'm not assuming anything.

You were complaining about being modded down, so you quite clearly had a problem with it.