That’s fine, though. Why do we take for granted that the “town square” should be able to exist as a for-profit enterprise?

People are nostalgic for the days of the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers when people were fine debating their opposing views in the papers without dropping the hammer down on one side for being morally repugnant.

Who is “people”? Do Black people miss the days when you could pick up the paper and read people arguing for Jim Crow? My life would definitely not be improved if I had to listen to people telling me how Jews control the banks.

People like Musk who self identify as classical liberals, or whatever the faddish term for that happens to be.

Going by surveys, a lot of black people are against increasing immigration. Openly crossing that line is often justification for dropping the internet hammer. One gets the sense that, at some point, the hammer was used with more restraint.

Or it was just used against other people. You know, exiling gay kids from their families and friends has been a longtime tradition. Is that not “the hammer?”

It's not the same hammer I'm discussing. The equivalent would be censorship of pleas made in favor of homosexual causes, which the US is not particularly known for.

What? You don’t think women/homosexuals/minorities were barred from holding certain cultural megaphones?

Fredick Douglass owned and published a newspaper that was not censored - when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.

> Fredick Douglass owned and published a newspaper that was not censored

He was the owner and publisher, and his viewpoint, while not exactly establishment, was well within the Overton Window where it was published.

> when you look at abolitionist articles or early drafts from the Seneca Falls Convention, you are not likely to find a bunch of scribble marks or other equivalents to the [deleted] tag that litters the internet today.

Because their weren't user content platforms with the owner exercising post-publication editing, for technological reasons. The ideas that were censored were just never published (sometimes because those holding them were murdered for expressing them), not published and then edited partially after the fact.

>Because their weren't user content platforms with the owner exercising post-publication editing, for technological reasons. The ideas that were censored were just never published (sometimes because those holding them were murdered for expressing them), not published and then edited partially after the fact.

There were cases of this happening, often in the South, but in many other places it was not common practice.

The consolidation of much conversation onto 'platforms' with the internet makes the act of censorship a lot more obvious, and tends to set people's 1984 alarms off more. We mocked China for deleting scores and scores of Weibo comments, but here we are doing the same.

No, “we” are not doing the same. In China the state compels private companies to hold and enforce certain positions toward certain speech. That’s exactly what the “anti-censorship” lobby is asking for, and it’s not at all what is happening today in the US.

Today, you have private companies managing content on their own platforms according to their own policies. The government can and does ask for certain actions and, unlike China, companies are more than welcome to decline those requests.

Indeed, the relationship of the state and business does differ in China. In the US it is more decentralized.

To the person who considers the outcome of something like Weibo covered in deleted comments and only having survivors parrot narrow lines, this is a bad thing, even if the cause differs.

I’m not an expert on censorship in China, so I won’t weigh in on that, but in the US it’s a non-issue. If you can’t discuss some conservative view on Twitter, move over to Truth Social or Gab or the many Mastodon instances that exist explicitly to host that content.

“X group wasn’t censored because I can find an instance of X that wasn’t censored” is quite the argument.

You know you can find plenty of racist and sexist scribbles all over the internet, not [deleted]. According to your logic: proof that they are not censored!

When you want to track censorship in those days, you'd typically look for lawsuits. The US had blasphemy laws in local areas for a long time, but those were rarely enforced or taken to court, for example.

This is a total non-sequitur and ends up being a self-defeating argument anyway.

You’d look for people who couldn’t get business loans, couldn’t rent a storefront, couldn’t find a lawyer who would work for them to file lawsuits around their censorship, couldn’t leave their captor’s estate, couldn’t look at someone the wrong way without getting beaten to death, etc etc.

I actually struggle to imagine a worse way to track censorship than looking for lawsuits lol.

The NAACP and other organizations existed at the same time as Jim Crow. The reality was that the extent of the racial oppression varied considerably based on geography. Many find the idea of current censorship more intimidating because it exists everywhere within the US and many places outside of it, so there would be no good way of escaping it - while many blacks instead had the option of fleeing northward.

Got it. Social media sites moderating content is at least as bad as Jim Crow. Truly striking argument, though probably in the opposite way as intended.

If you could guarantee the problems are limited to social media moderation, it would be no issue. But the kinds of people who cause bad social media moderation also have their pies in many other kinds of policies, and they want blood. The end result of this would be worse than Jim Crow because it would be applied nationwide.

I see... and I guess this argument is meant to be a testimony to one's ability to imagine worlds worse than Jim Crow?

There are many possible worlds that are far worse than Jim Crow. Sure. What does that have to do with reality again?

Should we be alarmed about people ordering at restaurants given that we can't guarantee they have no intention to eat the entirety of planet Earth?

I mean, people were blacklisted in the 50s for allegedly being communists, right? People were actually killed for opposing Jim Crow. We had codes about what you were allowed to show in movies and comics.

I don’t get the sense that the hammer was ever used with more restraint. Rather, I get the sense that the people complaining didn’t care about the hammer when it was only wielded against others, and have decided to speak up now that it’s finally being used against them.

I’ve never seen anyone ”censored” on Twitter for opposing immigration.

It helps that neither of those sides were morally repugnant.

When moral repugnance really did have to get addressed between a national divide, the hammer did get dropped down on one side of them (the Civil War).

Slavery wasn't a new thing when the Constitution was written. The divide between the North and the South was noted by several founding fathers as a nasty issue, and it was probably a mistake to unite the two territories in such a way to begin with.

Hmm it was only on the fringes of culture that people were strongly against slavery around the founding of the country. Then there was a “moral awakening” via the Quakers that made it less and less culturally viable until culminating in open warfare.

So culture shifted underneath the issue, just like is happening today with all sorts of issues of moral repugnance.

The moral shift played a part in galvanizing enthusiasm for the war, but the Civil War ultimately was started by Northern statists who were adamant about maintaining a firm control over the North American heartland. Recall that the Emancipation proclamation came three years into the war.

Are you really pushing the Lost Cause narrative here? It’s revisionist history that’s widely rejected by historians. The main cause of the war was slavery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy

The CSA seceded for the State's Right to Own Slaves. That much is obvious. The Northern response, as stated by Lincoln and understood by the majority of volunteers, was to Preserve the Union. That much is also obvious. Total abolitionism emerged only three years into the war. If the Northern population did not have a strong desire to Preserve the Union and only relied on abolitionist forces, then there would hardly have been a Civil War at all.

Northerners wanted control of the new territories because of slavery. Because at that point it was something most northerners did not want expanded across the rest of the continent as, again, a moral concern borne of a recent moral awakening.

It was an economic, political, and a moral concern. Free Soilers wanted the land for their own purposes. Expansion of slave states would mean expansion of a Senate group that would be in favor of reducing taxes and tariffs, an issue that almost caused a civil war to happen 40 years prior.

On the other hand, if something’s morally repugnant it should be called out as such.

What about one that allows concessions outside, though? How might a vendor be able to set up shop, maybe for a small fee? Or should the public conversation be a designated no-enterprise zone?

Ideally, ethics would prevent us from mixing business with politics and pleasure, but maybe there is a balance that would allow for a way to fund these social projects we say we value so highly, but turn out our pockets when it's time to drop a dollar into the plate as it gets passed by.

I'm tired of watching democratic institutions shrivel and die only to be replaced by plastic replicas.

Seemingly fundamental forces keep tearing down our Towers of Babel, and I wonder if we'll ever learn that the best organizational patterns for humanity are smaller groups responsible to and holding responsible the state. Whenever we try to do things bigger than that, we end up getting all authoritarian and creepy.

I think the analogy has stretched past its breaking point, because I don’t quite understand what you’re saying.

It's not like their original comment is that opaque, but here's my attempt to break down (translate?):

Are we going to continue to allow capitalist enterprise to have a say in public policy conversation (concessions stands outside the town square)?

Ideally no from an ethics perspective, but then we as a populace need a way to and habit of contributing directly ourselves to fund social services ("dropping a dollar in the plate" - reference to collecting tithe during Catholic services).

They're tired of seeing public services starved of funding, then privatized and replaced by corporate, profit-driven ("plastic") replicas.

Basics of human nature keep undermining our attempts to build giant organizations together. We need to make and keep government a local, small-scale, accountable practice we all participate in, rather than one giant federal tent nobody is connected to - that gets Orwellian.

Hope that helps and hope I represented it faithfully.

I was thinking specifically journalism and newspapers, which acted as our national "town squares" up until social media killed it. Advertisers would pay for a portion of the page and we would paste in their business card alongside the news and opinions.

That's how we used to fund public debate. Now we fund it by watching advertisements scroll past tweets by journalists and politicians, debating and sharing memes. Meta and Twitter reap those profits now.

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." –A.J. Liebling

I just think it would be cool if the public had some kind of ownership over the debate, rather than someone else who gets to determine the terms under which it occurs. The internet was supposed to be our public square.

Even better if the public can profit from all the money that gets generated from selling our attention. We can use that for public services, like you mention.

You did a great job, though. Thanks.

I guess I don't understand how newspapers running ads against opinion pieces is any different from social networks running ads against posts. Also, that hasn't gone away? The Internet has changed how news publications work, but they definitely still exist!

But also, insofar as "town square" means that everyone can contribute, it's a better analogy for the Internet than it ever was for newspapers. There are no gatekeepers! Social media companies may have big megaphones, but they absolutely do not set the terms of acceptable discourse.

Like, what is it about the Internet that doesn't fit your description?

It does. Perhaps my wry attempt to illustrate that very similarity was lost on you?

Cheers, appreciate you clarifying!!

Well, as far as I can see, the only options are for-profit, charity, and government-run. Of those, charity is undependable, and government-run has an obvious conflict of interest. For-profit worked for a couple of centuries in the form of newspapers. (Letters to the editor was the only part that was really a "town square", and that was subject to the whims of the editors. But for much of that time, there was competition between newspapers, so they tended to allow most viewpoints to be heard at least every now and then.)

So for-profit worked... and then it didn't, at least in the form of newspapers. Twitter also worked, but it's even-handedness is in question, and there isn't good competition if you don't trust it to be honest.

Why does government have a conflicting interest? Like, when has the US government ever taken down a website that didn't contain illegal speech?

Taken down a website? Perhaps never. Now, what about a US government-run website? Do you trust them to keep that an open forum for criticism of Biden? Or Trump? Or the Congress that appropriates money to fund the website? I don't.

My point is that you can just make your own website!

My point is that, if the government makes a "town square", you can't trust them to let it be an honest town square. Sure, you can make one yourself. But then it's either for-profit, or charity; it's not government.

So you're answering something, but it's not what I said.

You’re not wrong about the advertisers but I wouldn’t cède the point they’re trying to refute either. People claim that executives are are purely motivated by money, but that just doesn’t hold up with the advertisers or with Twitter itself. They have their own political agendas, and time and again they are willing to sacrifice short term profit for long term political victories.

Money is power. People who want power want to use it. They’re not just dragons sitting on their hoards.

If you go down that road of thinking, you'll end up noticing that those with the most power usually aren't the most rich. Power is power, and it usually involves some butter, but more guns.

> those advertisers often had strict political biases.

yeah, those bloody socialists.

Curiously, many large corporations seems to be full of employees who believe strongly in socialism of some kind.

Counterintuitively, HN has proven it is the corporations who are truly the socialists...

Wouldn't that just be evidence that most people prefer collective actions and working together over the mythology of rugged individualism?