> These laws are not about protecting speech. They’re about politicians ensuring that a favored constituency has access to someone else’s megaphone to spread a message
I was a high school teacher for a long time. When explaining to students how I facilitated discussion in the classroom, I talked with them about the idea of the loudest voice. If you don't moderate a discussion thoughtfully, it will be taken over by the few people with the loudest voices.
We see this same dynamic all the time in online communities. Moderators quiet the loudest voices so everyone else can have a meaningful conversation. These laws are aimed at letting the loudest people shout everyone else down, so the people trying to hold onto power can't be challenged.
I think this is an inaccurate characterization. Over the past 20 years content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms based on the tacit understanding that they would behave like content neutral common carriers. If the platform's willingness to abuse this power had been apparent from the start they would never have become so powerful.
People created their own "megaphones" over many years only for the platform to start dictating to them how they can communicate with the audiences they've built, often based on naked political animus. It was a bait and switch - a fraud.
That said, having listened to most of the oral arguments I think SCOTUS will strike down these laws.
The fundamental problem is that the Internet centralizes power in a small number of corporations which then become ripe for capture by powerful interests, whether political, ideological, or commercial.
IMO the ultimate solution is a decentralized Internet like https://freenet.org/ that doesn't require creators to hand over control of their voices to powerful third parties.
That's a strong assertion. Do you have any evidence to back that up?
AIUI, the law governing this (at least in the US -- which is relevant since we're discussing US state laws being challenged in the courts) is the Communications Decency Act of 1996[0], with section 230[1] of that law being the pointy end of the stick WRT these particulars. I would also point out that the above serves as a front-end (in that it allows the courts to reject lawsuits misdirected at platforms, when they should be directed at the source of the speech) to the First Amendment[2].
Please detail where, exactly, any of the above supports the claim that "content creators were encouraged to use and invest in building an audience on these platforms based on the tacit understanding that they would behave like content neutral common carriers."
Perhaps I'm missing something important (which is certainly possible) and I'd appreciate being enlightened. As such, I look forward to your response.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
Edit: Cleaned up prose.
> That's a strong assertion. Do you have any evidence to back that up?
I was there, I remember it. I co-founded a pioneering but ultimately unsuccessful online video company around 2006 called Revver that had to deal with moderation issues quite early on, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Video were our competitors. The idea that we would use this power in a politically biased way never occurred to us, it was obvious that it would be unacceptable, it was unconscionable.
And we weren't the exception, we were the norm that included companies like YouTube and Reddit. I think anyone working on a user-generated content startup at that time would tell you the same thing.
In 2006, the internet was probably dominated by western audiences. Now, the user base of any large social media site includes much more of the world, including groups like Hamas, ISIS, etc. and they would absolutely claim their content is political.
After 9/11 radicalization on the Internet was a serious concern - but most people seemed to understand that freedom of speech meant tolerating speech you didn't like.
For example, just a year after 9/11 the New York Times published a letter by Osama bin Laden explaining his views and motivations. That's almost impossible to imagine today (when apparently the NYT will fire a writer for admitting they like Chick-fil-A).
I personally fall on the "maximal free speech" side of preferences. If an ISIS video isn't calling for imminent lawless action [2], then I don't want YouTube deleting it. But I don't think that YouTube should be legally required to keep hosting an ISIS video that is technically legal under the First Amendment, and I also understand that my preference is unpopular. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of Americans agreed with me when I say that an ISIS member should be able to publish repugnant, bigoted, propagandistic, even violent videos so long as those videos are legal under First Amendment standards.
I personally want minimal filtering on this sort of content because:
1) I'm in no danger of actually being recruited to a terrorist cause.
2) Primary sources, like combat videos from the Syrian civil war (including propaganda videos that compile such clips) can provide more information about ongoing conflicts, combatants, and world events than general purpose news outlets can provide.
I think that most people are against dissemination of this sort of content because point 2 is irrelevant to them (they're not news junkies closely following armed conflicts) and, stochastically speaking, a few people who see terrorist propaganda videos will be persuaded to take up terror. Or maybe it's even less calculating: the reasoning could be as simple as "ISIS has a disgusting ideology, and disgusting ideologies shouldn't get free speech considerations."
The extreme breadth of speech protected under the First Amendment is more than what the median American wants protected, and spans more than what social media companies want to provide hosting for. High minded commitments to free speech like news outlets publishing a letter by Osama bin Laden in 2002 [3] are more notable for their rarity than for exemplifying a general standard of the time.
[1] https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/jihad-20-social-media-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_the_American_People
An online video is almost by definition incapable of being incitement to imminent lawless action. The threshold for this magic phrase is roughly along the lines of leading a mob and saying "there is <member of outgroup>, lynch them." Pretty much anything short of that is constitutionally-protected free speech under the First Amendment, and it's virtually impossible for an internet video to be sufficiently imminent for the purposes of incitement to imminent lawless action.
That is almost literally the opposite of what Brandenburg v Ohio held! (Many people tend to do this: they assume that the phraseology is meant to limit speech along the lines of Schenck v US or Whitney v California, what is now known as the "clear and present danger" standard, which is what Brandenburg v Ohio was explicitly overturning.)
Brandenburg v Ohio held that advocating violent overthrow of the government is free speech, but you need the very direct link between the speech and the illegal actions for the speech to become illegal. The emphasis in "incitement to imminent lawless action" of Brandenburg is meant to be "imminent", and later court cases have generally held that "imminent" is meant to be read in very short timespans.
Empirically speaking, we saw more than a few of these people on January 6th.
If I were to guess at the political motivation for allowing one group to be criticized in any imaginable way, while there were attendants that did not participate, while the summer of love can only be described without mentioning the participants involved in general mayhem: I'd suggest it's because the point is to create division among the masses and thwart any attempt at changing the status quo. The source of both is the violation of the social contract by those in a position to do so and the victims are roughly every participant in both events, whether they committed a crime or not, and nearly every other US citizen.
The "authorities" only interest is to redirect blame and avoid responsibility or disenfranchisement from control of society. Thinking they have any particular interest in one group or another, except for themselves , is delusional.
That's the real issue I see with more censorship, more control, more surveillance, more integrated intelligence services, more focus on "culture". All the things that matter to them will be protected by whatever means necessary while any material concern, or hope, for the rest is just a wheel to turn to keep the ship on course. Nothing personal at the top, I'm sure, just business as usual. Sorry, not sorry.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-democrats-could-...
Have a good one either way! Certainly, no reason to quarrel when, orientation ignored, we're overwhelmingly in similar circumstances.
In any case, there's enough "both sides!!1"-style equivocating on the net, and I'm not really interested in engaging with that sort of low-effort distraction on HN. Have a good one!
Apologies for not documenting the link, and I don't mind if you check it or not. I think it's unfair to say "the game is fixed" is conspiratorial, that is a fair criticism of the system we have when the DNC, and I'm sure the Republicans would be willing, to propose that, as Newsweek reported:
> The most recent court hearing on the case was held on April 25, during which the DNC reportedly argued that the organization's neutrality among Democratic campaigns during the primaries was merely a "political promise," and therefore it had no legal obligations to remain impartial throughout the process.[0]
and Salon:
> The DNC is advancing the argument that any claims to be neutral and fair to all candidates were nothing but “political promises” and are unenforceable by law. They claim that there was no expectation that they would actually be evenhanded in their treatment of Sanders and Clinton. They have made this case despite the fact that many in DNC leadership made claims of fairness when Sanders supporters clamored for accountability during and after the primary.[1]
---
> Based on the 1 cryptic sentence you provided before linking out, I'm guessing the link is similarly unrelated.
Well its an article about how the Democrats may form their own certification interruption if Trump wins and my assumption, which is not a judgement, is that given what I know, you would be more supportive of that than the event you mentioned. I think they're both childish but that doesn't mean you can't appreciate the possibility.
The relation between my comments and the article is that the summer of love, Jan. 6th, and the pandemic brought about previously unseen levels of censorship and propaganda on the internet. The powers that brought these about are apparently above the letter of the law because section 230 protections depend on acting as a common carrier, while the level of interference and integration of former natsec officers into media companies suggests the government is acting unconstitutionally through private companies.
> which is republican government efforts to compel speech in order to make sure the next insurrection is successful.
You say that as if corporations are people and that people cannot be trusted to be the judge of information and decide their own politics, which is a possible political position but not a statement of fact. Certainly corporations can editorialize and manage their content but can they do that and _still_ be protected by Section 230 or are they only protected otherwise?
Now this was a somewhat higher-effort distraction and I hope you have a good one too.
0: https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-rigged-hillary-clint...
1: https://www.salon.com/2017/05/13/the-dncs-elephant-in-the-ro...
> You say that as if corporations are people
The discussion here is whether republican government officials can compel me to speak because I own or operate a company (corporation or not), or because I volunteer to moderate a subreddit, or because I am an operator of an IRC channel, or otherwise operate some sort of online service on which people can post to each other. Which is what they're trying to do now.
Honestly, I challenge you to stay on topic without mentioning the Democratic party. They aren't the ones who passed this law. Republicans are. False equivalencies like this:
> Democrats may form their own certification interruption
...aren't relevant, especially when we're discussing the violent, deadly insurrection perpetrated by republicans, not a "certification interruption", which seems to be a term coined just now.
Here again, you say:
> The discussion here is whether republican government officials can compel me to speak because I own or operate a company (corporation or not), or because I volunteer to moderate a subreddit, or because I am an operator of an IRC channel, or otherwise operate some sort of online service on which people can post to each other.
But the 5th circuit points out, correctly in my opinion, that circumstantially conveying the message of a user in an open platform with privileges regarding liability is not compelled speech:
> The Fifth Circuit noted in its decision that the First Amendment protects the “‘right to refrain from speaking,’” and publishers cannot be compelled to publish specific articles or viewpoints. Yet the Fifth Circuit did not recognize “editorial discretion”—the right of private organizations to control the dissemination of third-party content—as an independent right. Instead, the Fifth Circuit explained that such discretion arises only where a law compels or restricts the speech of the private party itself—whereas the Texas law concerns not platforms’ own speech, but how platforms treat users' speech.
These platforms benefit from section 230, they can abandon that, accept responsibility as publishers, and do whatever they want outside some other asinine law controlling free expression.
...
I'm struck by how your stance seems to perfectly reflect a belief in guilt by association or representation since you're suggesting that it is as if the message was your own were you to moderate the forum, etc. and disagreeable content was outside your power to prevent.
I think it's a shame that there are so many angry and easily influenced people out there but the root causes aren't the mean words on the internets from other actual humans, as sad as that may also be.
Please especially avoid tit-for-tat spats like this one. They're not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I know I didn't flag them, but I dont know if they flagged me. I'd be surprised though, given their respectful replying.
Please especially avoid tit-for-tat spats like this one. They're not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Maybe in the filter bubble of a comp sci student lounge.
You've forgotten how everyone else lost their mind in 2001, and rallied behind a folksy strongman, and his cabal of stooges, useful idiots, and bad Boyars.
Most people at the time seemed to believe that finding and exterminating every terrorist (Alleged or otherwise) the government could get its hands on would be the only way we could remain free. They hate us for our freedom, and all that. Things like the PATRIOT act have support outside the nerd-sphere, and the NSA revelations were a nothingburger to most people, and torturing people in Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, well, they are all guilty anyways.
The only reason those views and motivations get any airtime is so they can be attacked (without opportunity for debate or rebuttal). Had his values and goals had been less comically antithetical to ours, or if he wasn't condemned by his own actions as an irredeemable monster (which further damns anything he has to say), you wouldn't have seen a whiff of them. We only hit those we can beat.
My example of the NYT publishing Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with comp sci student lounges, can you imagine they NYT publishing something like that today? The equivalent might be an op-ed by Vladimir Putin, it wouldn't happen. The views of the legacy media have shifted dramatically on free speech over the past two decades, particularly over the past 8 years.
If these platforms had started out censoring particular political content, they would not have had the same mass adoption, or there may have been more free-speech competitors.
As one of those people in question, it was never unthinkable. Even during the 2000's, it was common to ban people from MSN chatrooms. Before that, it was common to ban people from IRC channels, individual IRC servers, or even entire IRC networks. Did the GNAA have a right to "be platformed" indefinitely wherever they wanted?
Also, the "censorship" in question more often deals with things like insults and other incivility, spamming, death threats, etc. Not mere "political" speech. I doubt many folks were banned from /r/SCOTUS for politely saying "I politically disagree with this ruling". We see via screenshots in the amicus the sort of stuff that was actually moderated.
Indeed, the "censorship" which spawned these laws was the banning of a dude actively calling for violent insurrection against the government, and receiving it, and continuing to encourage it during the violent insurrection. That's the "political speech" the bill authors had in mind when drafting it. It's possible that the "censorship" in question is all that stopped the putsch from succeeding. One can see why fans of said dude and his insurrection were so upset by that.
If someone makes a threat on a person or groups life online, or doing something illegal, then I agree it shouldn’t be allowed. But censorship today goes far beyond that.
The purpose of the platform matters. MSN chats (group chats?) and sub-reddits are smaller places presumably set up by another user for a specific purpose. I have no problem with people being banned/censored for whatever reason from these smaller forums.
I have an issue with censorship when the platform is generic, not dedicated to a particular topic or group, like Twitter, YouTube, or Reddit as a whole. When one or more dominant third party platforms censor the same people, it has an effect similar to that of government censorship.
I also think the censorship will backfire, because by being shut down, it gives power to the ideas being censored. “There must be a reason they are shutting down discussion. They have no real answer to it!”
I agree that online harassment is ugly, but I still believe in absolute free speech on these generic platforms. The best solution to all of this would be to have block lists that people could opt-in or out of. Don’t want to see something? Subscribe to the block list.
I don't see how that justifies the government compelling you or I or IRC chanops or subreddit moderators or Twitter admins to say what the government wants us to say. None of those were used to ban the former president when he was engaging in the "political speech" of inciting a violent insurrection and encouraging it while it was happening.
> If someone makes a threat on a person or groups life online, or doing something illegal, then I agree it shouldn’t be allowed. But censorship today goes far beyond that.
And yet, the speech the government is trying to compel here includes, but is not limited to: insults; slurs; obscenity; spam; inciting violence; inciting insurrection; death threats; and more.
> The purpose of the platform matters
Does it, though? That seems like an arbitrary line drawn to avoid logical inconsistencies. Who defines what the purpose is? Who defines how it matters?
> The best solution to all of this would be to have block lists that people could opt-in or out of. Don’t want to see something? Subscribe to the block list.
Is it, though? This part of the post you replied to, bears repeating:
> Indeed, the "censorship" which spawned these laws was the banning of a dude actively calling for violent insurrection against the government, and receiving it, and continuing to encourage it during. That's the "political speech" the bill authors had in mind when drafting it. It's possible that the "censorship" in question is all that stopped the putsch from succeeding.
Blocklists wouldn't have prevented it. If you or I or Twitter don't want to aid and abet violence and insurrection, the government should not be able to compel us to do so.
Beyond what the other (excellent) comment had to say about this, why does what content creators may have believed mean fuck-all in terms of what these cases are arguing? Nobody would have used Facebook if they thought Facebook would "censor" them?
And besides that, your assertion that it's a bait and switch implies that all these creators would've been able to foster the exact same followings using, what, their own websites? Accounts on different social networks? Dubious at best. A lot of the aforementioned creators benefited strongly from the network effects of those platforms and the algorithms bringing their content to new followers. It's likely if they didn't grow up on whichever platform they picked, they wouldn't have grown at all.
I didn't say it did, I acknowledged that SCOTUS would probably rule against the TX and FL laws. I'm talking about the broader context.
> Nobody would have used Facebook if they thought Facebook would "censor" them?
I think if people knew then what they know now about how these platforms would behave starting around 2015 they would have had a much more difficult time achieving their dominant positions, there would have been far more skepticism.
Of course it's hard to prove a counterfactual but that's my view having been a small part of it.
Maybe. The polarization of the country has increased significantly since the covid era.
Plus most of this censorship discourse really only occurs at the edges. 99% of my meatspace social network cares about seeing puppy vidoes or whatever Taylor Swift has to say. Exactly zero of them have any expectation that their posts will ever be censored because they don't post anything oppositional.
I think that, even with censorship, void a real alternative competitor, the networks would have grown all the same. The only difference is maybe TruthSocial or Rumble would have spun off a few years earlier.
Maybe it's changed. I haven't touched Freenet since...I think 2010? I just remember seeing index pages with links to tons of sites on Freenet, and a considerable number of them were links to CSAM.
Nope. Deleted that. Ain't gonna be a part of that.
For those wondering, the initialism relates to extreme child abuse. And now I too get to wish I hadn't looked.
edit: Or at least, if I was responsible for running IC, we would all be on the list with appropriate tags. Thankfully, I am not.
In any case, the original Freenet was never going to be a general-purpose replacement for today's centralized services as it can only handle static content. For the past few years we've been working on a sequel to Freenet that is much more general-purpose, you can learn about it at https://freenet.org/. While the original Freenet was analagous to a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a decentralized computer.
As part of it we're building a decentralized reputation system (based on a "web of trust") to address illegal/offensive/objectionable content.
On a more serious note - part of me really wants to know, and a much larger part of me doesn't.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percutaneous_transhepatic_chol...
In short, the problem is that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of "problematic" content. No matter what definition you think is reasonable for moderation, there will both be people who complain that it is too permissive and people who complain that it is too restrictive. At a large enough scale, people on both extremes of the spectrum will be complaining about your moderation policies--and at very large scales, there will be politicians to listen to them!
But this is rather the point. What you need is a wall between hosting and discovery.
Alice has some rather controversial things to say, Bob wants to hear about them and Caren doesn't. So Bob and Caren should be using different filtering systems that they can choose for themselves. What shouldn't happen is that Alice gets banned from the internet or shadow banned on a dominant platform with a network effect just because Caren doesn't like her, because Caren should only be deciding for Caren and not Bob.
This doesn't mean Caren has to design her own filtering system. She can use someone else's. But she should have a choice in which one to use, independent of the underlying platform, and so should Bob.
Right now we tie the filtering system to the thing with the network effect and then have Zuckerberg or Musk deciding for everybody when it should be everybody deciding for themselves.
Filtering content is a needed, but ultimately losing proposition (time and resource is one thing, accuracy is another).
Having the source choose which megaphone they'll use and have communities surrounding those probably works better for everyone. It's only an issue when Caren's goal is to have Alice silenced in the first place.
Which is where the network effect becomes an issue.
Bob wants to open up his feed and see all the content he likes from Alice and Dave and Erin and Frank. If Alice goes somewhere else, Bob can follow her, but then Dave and Erin and Frank are still on the old site, and maybe Bob doesn't want to give that up, but the others don't even know that Alice exists and have no incentive to move.
> It's only an issue when Caren's goal is to have Alice silenced in the first place.
That can be a problem, but what if it's just that Carol doesn't want Alice in her feed? If everyone can choose their own algorithm then she can choose one that doesn't show Alice and Bob chooses one that does. If everyone on the same site gets the same algorithm then Carol starts agitating for one that doesn't show Alice and now there's problems.
There can be one filter that only blocks spam and scams, another that blocks conservatives, another that blocks spam, scams and celebrity gossip, another that only shows technical content etc. You open the config options and pick one, like you choose an ad blocker or a radio station. If you don't like it you pick a different one. It shouldn't be that hard.
And if the answer is "AI", then who trains it and with what data?
Whoever makes it? The entire premise is that anybody could make one, however they want, and people could choose the one that works best for them. Go create one that operates by manual curation if you want to.
But here's an answer to this one:
> And if the answer is "AI", then who trains it and with what data?
You do. On a network where votes/ratings are public, make a filter that looks at how you vote, compares it to other users to find the users with the most similar tastes, and then shows you the things that they liked. Occasionally it shows you something generally popular or vaguely controversial at random to see if you like it and if you do it shows you more.
This isn't even modern "AI", it's old school machine learning and statistics. And it works pretty well until bots figure out how to game it, and then you have to come up with a way to detect the bots, and it becomes a cat and mouse game.
Which is why we need the evolutionary pressure on the other side. Have lots of different filter algorithms made by different people so the bots have to hit multiple targets at once, and users can pick the ones that are most effective at excluding them and don't get stuck with a crappy one they can't change because it's tied to the network itself.
> Bob wants to open up his feed and see all the content he likes from Alice and Dave and Erin and Frank. If Alice goes somewhere else, Bob can follow her, but then Dave and Erin and Frank are still on the old site, and maybe Bob doesn't want to give that up, but the others don't even know that Alice exists and have no incentive to move.
Why is it objectionable to you for Bob to have the ability to sort his feed differently than you?
This is objectively false. The forums run by a tinpot dictator who excludes too many things that people want to see have zero users, not the most users. Many of the most popular forums became popular before they had any kind of strong moderation and only adopted it after they already had a lot of users. HN is one of the rare examples where the moderation was present from the beginning, a major reason it works is that it's a specialized site that doesn't target general audiences, and it's "popular" but not half as popular as 4chan.
As a general rule people don't like spam, but if the place where their friends are has some spam, they're going to stay there while complaining about the spam. And, of course, they hate it when somebody excludes something that they want. But that might not get them to leave either, because network effects are powerful, even when they hate it. Twitter users have been calling it "the hellsite" for many years while continuing to be Twitter users.
Which is why large general-purpose platforms need different algorithms for different people -- because different people want different things.
With the new Freenet, we're using a decentralized moderation system that lets users control what they see or don't see, based on sensible defaults. This builds on a concept from the original Freenet called web-of-trust[1]. I believe this method, combined with the fact that centralized censorship is impossible in the new Freenet due to its lack of centralized control, offers a strong alternative.
[1] https://github.com/hyphanet/plugin-WebOfTrust/blob/master/de...
https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/
In essence, you can either curate all content yourself, or you can upvote other people's curation for a given community. The curators who are voted for by the majority of a community effectively become the default moderators for it, but any member can explicitly opt out of curation by any given moderator.
I got banned from my city's subreddit for making a mild criticism about crime once. Now I'm shut off from events, networking, etc.
I'm from the southeast, which is a conservative area of the country. The internet I grew up on had thicker skin, wasn't trigger happy with banning, and because of that I was exposed to ideas and perspectives that I wouldn't have ordinarily been in contact with. People didn't have a disgruntled disposition that immediately banned opposing views on sight, so I was able to soak in so much information.
Expressly because of this, I was able to change my shape from a conservative kid into a well-rounded moderate. I don't think I could replicate this experience easily on today's internet. People are divided into factions and are quick to mute and ban those they disagree with. (The rage-centric algorithms also heighten confrontational language and showdowns, but that's another issue.)
Censorship almost always leads to imbalanced power dynamics and gatekeeping. It's become a tit-for-tat tool of retaliation and playing "gotcha". People enjoy digitally flicking each other off by banning them. It's super fucked.
Filtering is important, but we should have protocols for that where individuals have complete control and discretion. I don't know how that's supposed to work on platforms that are wholly controlled by profit-seeking corporations, but maybe legislation can craft a way forward.
I really hope we don't dive deeper into the censorship rabbit hole. It genuinely terrifies me more than any other issue facing humanity.
The mistake I made as a kid was in believing people wanted things like intellectual freedom and to contemplate things they don't agree as to potentially grow and learn something new.
People don't want that at all. I think we can see that largely, people want to be told what to think and then demonize those that think differently for entertainment. That is basically what defines our culture in 2024.
This is just the start of this new culture too. There is so much room left to run when you still have people who remember what things were like at the start of the internet.
What is gen alpha going to save the culture? I think that will be a really comical thought in 15-20 years.
We are still pretty close to the surface. Maybe I won't because of old age but as a society we are going way deeper.
They simply work more effectively.
More specifically - having all actors in the same ecology ensures more opportunities for interaction.
Platforms are synonymous with a standard way to connect to nodes on their network.
I’m increasingly certain that (to some extent) platforms would be more effective if treated as public goods.
At the same time the idea of a public good platform is far too close to big brother.
Case in point - the great firewall of China.
The same thing does not necessarily happen on social media, at least not in the same way. Two people can talk and post at the same time without preventing each other from communicating to their audience. And you can filter obnoxious users should you wish to do so.
But if the platform bans people or deletes posts because they discuss things they disagree with politically, you prevent the audience from accessing content they might find interesting. In this case the moderation is trying to shutdown the debate not really facilitating it.
You need moderation, but the big platform have clearly shown that they have trouble resisting the temptation of abusing it.
Except it's not a megaphone because, as another commenter reminded HN in a recent thread about "federation" protocols, the internet is not a broadcast medium. (It's still point-to-point that's being used to spread the message.)
Yeah, you're not for censoring people, you're just for "moderating the loudest people". It definitely isn't censorship that you want to remove the voices of people you disagree with, definitely not censorship, you just want "the loudest voices moderated". Keep telling yourself that.
> TABLE OF CONTENTS [...]
> ARGUMENT ............... 6
> Amici Censor Irrelevant and Inappropriate Speech to Cultivate Healthy Online Communities Built on Common Interests. This Includes Removing Death Threats Aimed at Members of This Court. ........... 9
> Amici Could Be Sued for Censoring Internet Trolls Who Are Calling for the Execution of Supreme Court Justices. ........ 19
> Those Who Are “Censored” by Amici Can Speak Elsewhere. ........... 22
But I guess a bunch of people that full of themselves are full enough of themselves to think that SCOTUS is going to care about an amicus written by a bunch of anonymous Internet people. Sure, they moderate death threats, but they also moderate away anything they might have to disagree with. And then pull stunts on the order of "I'll reinstate your account if you write a 500-word essay on why you're wrong."
I would argue that the reason these subreddits are successful, has little to do with the moderation, most successful subreddits are simply successful because they have good real estate. They were simply the first to snatch up the common nouns "law" and "SCOTUS".
They write:
> Under the challenged laws, removal of such a scintillating contribution to legal discourse would require amici to provide HateSpeechLuvr with an individualized explanation for the removal, and expose amici to the risk of legal action by the state, or, more dangerously, private actors (like Mr. Luvr).
Do the challenged laws actually apply to Reddit moderators, as opposed to Reddit the corporation? I don't think on a plain reading they actually do. Both the Florida and Texas laws apply to actions by "social media platforms". Reddit itself is a "social media platform", but I don't think an individual volunteer Reddit moderator is – so I don't think this law would apply directly to them. In any event, were SCOTUS to uphold these laws, they could make clear the scope of their application in upholding them, such that private individuals such as volunteer Reddit moderators were clearly excluded from it.
And the "scintillating contribution" it is talking about is a single sentence with no meaningful content, just an extremely defamatory insult which includes the n-word. Even if SCOTUS upholds these laws, I doubt any attempt to challenge the moderation of that specific contribution is going to succeed in the courts.
Arguments were heard yesterday. Luckily https://www.npr.org/2024/02/26/1233506273/supreme-court-soci... suggests that the justices were skeptical of the Florida and Texas laws.
Arguments are being heard today. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2023/22-555 links to a current recording.