I consider my doctor a fact checker, and I certainly wouldn't route around them just because they had the extraordinary moral audacity to check facts and not report garbage to me. The BMJ also makes decisions about what is worthy for their name, and yes, that means they "censor" people from appearing on their platform.

You could say that one man's garbage is another man's treasure, but I'm not sure I would ever say that to my doctor.

Your doctor is, indeed, simply a fact checker. A real one. Much as I and you, I assume, are fact checkers; we attempt to determine the veracity of information we encounter.

Your doctor is not a "fact checker" in the newspeak meaning of the term, because your doctor is not preventing other people from speaking to you.

My doctor chooses not to be a facilitator of speech for everyone, just like the BMJ or Facebook. The difference is that Facebook is free to the users and ad-supported. That difference meant world-changing virality.

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You had a deleted post talking about how I'm masturbating. It may surprise you that HN also "censors" you.

I can still read it.

Facebook is also not preventing anyone from speaking to me; they are refraining from giving some sources a megaphone.

If I want to know what the BMJ is writing, https://bmj.com is right there. Facebook is under no obligation to center it on my wall.

"A government that censors the press is also not preventing anyone from speaking to me; they are refraining from giving some sources a megaphone."

"refraining from giving some sources a megaphone" is exactly equivalent to "censorship". There's no difference.

Your argument confuses the prescriptive and the descriptive.

Descriptively, yes, Facebook is under no legal obligation to treat speech on its platform equally.

Prescriptively, Facebook is morally obligated to either assume full responsibility for user content (both editorialization and moderation), or no responsibility (passing through legal challenges directly to the user).

Additionally, as a de-facto public square, the principles of free speech still apply - a platform with more users than almost any single nation on Earth has citizens is morally bound to allow free speech.

A government which bans someone from speaking is preventing someone from talking to you. The government need not even consider the mode by which information is transmitted, or who is paying for these transmissions. If I am banned from sharing information such as classified intel, there is no means by which I am permitted to communicate this to you. A government which bans things also carries the force of government, which means laws, courts, police, and prison, which is typically the sole prerogative of government.

A public square is one which is funded and governed by public means, and the source of funding is one of the core mechanisms for ensuring that the public institution answers to public money.

Facebook is a private property, much like HN and the BMJ. That means people like dang, who also engage in banning, are not paid for by the government. Surely one's concept of public square does not entail private parties footing the bill for fancy engineers and metaphorical dang.

As a matter of prescription, why would we ever want Facebook to be the financially responsible party for public town squares? Why do we not have the government fund an actually public town square? Or ought we be using tax money to fund Facebook itself?

> A government which bans someone from speaking is preventing someone from talking to you.

I didn't say "prevents someone from speaking" - I specifically said "censors the press" because those are two very different cases (and because that's the exact language that GP used). A government could censor the press but not prevent private individuals from speaking to each other, so it wouldn't technically be preventing people from speaking - but it's pretty clear that it's still engaging in censorship (which was the point I was making to GP).

> If I am banned from sharing information such as classified intel

Classified material isn't covered under free speech. Free speech protects sentiment and expression. Classified information isn't sentiment, it's factual data, and it's protected for national security reasons, so as long as the material is classified for that reason, and not, say, to hide the embarrassment of a government official (which is illegal in the US at least), it's pretty clear that it's not free speech.

> A public square is one which is funded and governed by public means

I disagree. A "public square" is a forum for expression that appears to be open to all, styles itself as a public square, and has a substantial population in it. The CEO of Twitter, for instance, implied that Twitter is a public square[1].

> As a matter of prescription, why would we ever want Facebook to be the financially responsible party for public town squares?

Aha, that's a good question - we don't! Or, I don't - the problem is that it is a de-facto town square already, not that I want it to be (a regulated) one. Top of my wish-list is for it to not be that - for the DoJ to take it apart and/or force them to make it trivially easy to move your Facebook data somewhere else. (I suspect you share this sentiment) Unfortunately, because the DoJ appears to have lost its fangs over the past few decades, we're stuck with the Facebook behemoth - so, if we're stuck with it anyway, it's morally right for them to adhere to free-speech principles.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/09/05/jack-dorsey-twitter-us...

You are free to define the "public" part of public town square as essentially popular, open and social, but that is not the flashpoint of disagreement. When people disagree on the boundaries between private and public institutions, they are not disagreeing over whether something is popular, open, and social. A public elementary school is not public because it is popular, open, and social, and neither is a mall.

And public funding is a critical component to public governance. Facebook is accountable to private money. There is a reason why people don't like the idea of politics being funded by private money.

To change that, we might talk about using taxpayer money to fund Facebook, and rather than mere rules for companies, we might talk about public ownership and governance of Facebook and not merely breaking businesses apart. Breaking Facebook apart is about dealing with free market concerns. Nationalizing Facebook is about recognizing that Facebook ought be a public institution.

There's a significant difference between the behavior of a private institution and the behavior of government. Indeed, a government that censors the press is the exact opposite of a private medium exercising their editorial discretion. One is violation of freedom of the press, the other is freedom of the press. Facebook is under no more obligation to uncritically pass through bmj.com stories to their customers than my local newspaper is to run a classified ad saying the paper's owner belongs in jail, no matter how much I try to pay them to run it.

Under the political theory underpinning the origins of the US, private institutions have different moral obligations from governments because governments have the monopoly on violence, not simply because governments are big and have lots of "users." Facebook can't force anyone to use Facebook, and their competition is always one click away.

Facebook isn't a "public square" because it has no local geographic monopoly on space; it's the Internet, we have our choice of internet fora. This differs from the physical world, where one can't easily just go to the next public square over if the use of the nearby one is curtailed (hence the need for legal theory enacting the concept of "de-facto public square"). There's a problem if Facebook is the only online forum. But the solution to that is anti-trust law, not the government dictating what Facebook may not refrain from rebroadcasting via its network. Trying to solve the legitimate concerns of discourse manipulation via modification to First Amendment protections opens a Pandora's Box that is almost certainly best left closed (for starters: given the customer behavior we currently see, one could infer that people use Facebook because they like the signal-tuning. Stepping on the neck of Facebook's ability to signal-tune in a heavy-handed way risks driving users to alternative services that don't operate out of the US and therefore aren't beholden to any concept of First Amendment protections, for good or ill).

That’s not true. Facebook actively censors certain URLs from being shared in a DM on Messenger and WhatsApp. How is that any better than the “Great Firewall of China”?

China bans content through government policy, and government policy carries the force of government which applies to all public and private parties. The force of government means laws, courts, police, and prison, which is typically the sole prerogative of government.

HN, BMJ and Facebook pay for their expenses as private parties and may not wish use their money to help you broadcast your speech. The main difference between HN and Facebook is that Facebook is Very Big.

If your idea of free speech means that either HN or Facebook must pay for a metaphorical Dang and other fancy engineers to maintain your free speech...

Yes they are.

There are people who you cannot write personal messages to on facebook/messenger. They have to write you first, otherwise all your messages to them are marked as sent, not delivered and eventually seen, just sent.

I assume that political idelogy of aforementioned persons is obvious. And these people are not some no-names.

If you're describing me, those people are free to reach me via an alternate method. Facebook is not obligated to facilitate it.

It should not be legal to advertise the possibility of messaging someone, if that someone will not be able to receive the message.

edited to add:

Those poeple have facebook profiles, post stuff publicly, you can comment, tag and all that. Except private messages. All private messages are silently undelivered. No error, only sent.

> It should not be legal to advertise the possibility of messaging someone, if that someone will not be able to receive the message.

Unless I'm misinterpreting what you're saying, you seem to be saying that shadowbans should be illegal. Or at least, I don't see how any law that would prevent shadow delivery wouldn't prevent shadowbans. So I think we'll have to agree to disagree.

Would fedex shadowban be ok too?

They take parcels, give tracking numbers, but those specific persons never receive anything. Tracking is always stuck on "parcel enroute".

edit: clarified wording, to make it clear that fedex shadowban is a hypothetical situation

If they take my package, never deliver it, and claim they delivered it, that's theft of tangible property, punishable by state law (and federal, if they messed with interstate commerce).

There is no such "theft of information" for failing to route a data packet, nor should there be for obvious reasons.

Better analogy would be if a newspaper took money to run my ad but never ran it. Also theft, or at least try-able in civil court for failure to render service.

... But if they take a message from me, for free, on the understanding they'll route it and never route it? Much, much grayer legally. I have to prove harm and that they had a legal duty they abrogated. Neither are obvious regarding Facebook DMs.

OK, what about letters instead of parcels? It's not for free either, it's paid for by the metadata. They ask for a recipient, you tell them the recipient and they say ok, will deliver, but never do.

> It's not free either, it's paid for by the metadata

That's one of the things that could be argued in a court of law... That it was wrong for Facebook to collect data from someone on the false pretense that they would send a message they would not send. I wish the plaintiff who argues it the best of luck... Hell of an uphill battle. The notion data about a person has tangible value that belongs by default to the person and can therefore be exchanged is an open question (legally and morally). And there's still the issue of proof of harm. In fact, that's the biggest issue.

If a person thought they had communicated something via Facebook and Facebook falsely claimed it was sent when it was not, and that person could prove material harm as a result, they might have a civil case to rectify the specific harm. I struggle to imagine such a scenario, but I'll assume it could happen for the sake of argument. "Facebook silently black-holes your attempts to contact a celebrity" as an example, is not harm.

Does your doctor have a monopoly on speech? Does your doctor go around and tell people what to say and not say? Does your doctor have the authority to disallow other doctors from practicing? Is your doctor the only doctor you're allowed to go to, or can you just go to another one if you're not satisfied about their competence?

This reasoning by analogy doesn't really go anywhere.

No not in general.

There are facts. There are ways to make rational arguments based on those facts.

Those arguments don't have to be the same, or even produce the same results to be useful - because they state their basis and how, based on that they produce their conclusions.

That is a really useful and powerful thing.

> If the Telegraph controlled the "fact checker" the Guardian wouldn't exist. If the Guardian controlled the "fact checker", the Telegraph wouldn't exist.

Why? Having a fact checker that explains (even arguably incorrectly) why something is wrong isn't censorship.

A newspaper could be a factchecker (and sometime are) - if they explain their reasoning, or have some transparent way to see their reasoning.

This feels like a 'let perfect be the enemy of the good' type situation. Fact checking doesn't mean everything will be correct. It doesn't need to. Much like science doesn't claim to have the correct answer for everything - it's to the best of our knowledge based on the scientific method.

It's one of those language things. Newspeak necessarily requires co-opting the good meaning of a work in order for it to work. I am doubtful OP dislikes the true meaning of fact-checking but what "fact checking" has become in this modern age.

The problem is that there are two interpretations of "fact-checking is bad" which are not mutually exclusive:

(1) "Fact-checking" is a term used by people who are not interested in facts, but just want to control a narrative.

(2) Convincing the public that "fact-checking" is always done in bad faith is in the interest of people who do not want to actually be fact-checked, but rather want to control a narrative.

Well, that's one problem. The other problem is that (2) has the potential to be far more pernicious: it dismisses the possibility of material difference between real fact checks and propaganda disguised as such. "Fact checkers may have their own agendas" can be true without leading us to "therefore no facts should be checked." If we choose the latter, then we have largely given up on the possibility of facts at all, and we are, not to put too fine a point on it, well and truly fucked.

In the case of this BMJ article, it looks like there are reasonable questions as to whether the authors truly make a case that supports their conclusions. There's a comment from PaulDavisthe1st somewhere around here that links to both the actual article and the fact check, and it at least seems a bit more complicated than "THE BMJ IS BEING SUPPRESSED BY THE ELITES WHO DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW THE TRUTH, MAN," which is a distinct vibe I get from the comments.

The entire idea that there should be a narrative is the issue here.

"Fact checkers" attempt to produce a coherent narrative and force one side to win out.

But not all issues can be decided in that way.

fact.

[citation needed]

The emergent truth inherently obvious to those with reliably observation, pattern recognition, cognitive ability is far more reliable than the knowledge preached by academic priests from within ivory towers. The rejection of "fact checking" is a rejection of the academic model of institutional knowledge in general. Science (not empiricism mind you, but "science" as a class of researchers and Phds) has been found wanting and the masses no longer trust it.

TLDR, citations are for those who are incapable of making the arguments themselves and must outsource their very thought to other men they unquestioningly revere.