To me, the crux of the problem is how the platforms see themselves, vs. how many in media and the informed general public see them.
The informed general public opinion seems to be that Facebook and Twitter have mainstream media-level responsibility, i.e., with great distribution, comes great power, comes great responsibility. They are akin to newspapers in a way in this view, and have a responsibility to only promote reasoned perspectives.
Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, seem to see themselves more like a grocery store magazine rack, which have carried a wide variety of magazines including conspiratorial BS like the National Enquirer for years without any controversy whatsoever.
These two positions seem to be at loggerheads and operating on completely different planes.
Recently twitter was auto-suspending everybody who had "Elon Musk" as a subset of their name, including parody accounts such as "Italian Elon Musk" or puns involving the name. Twitter goes out of their way to prevent anything resembling fraud reguarding the blue-checkmarked accounts, yet if you have one, you're able to spew as much bullshit as you want.
Who gets a blue-checkmark is a rather arbitrary selection process, and Alex Jones retains his despite launching harassment campaigns against Sandy Hook victims. If you don't want to suspend the account, why not take away his coveted blue checkmark?
@alexqarbuckle changed his account display name to "Italian Elon Musk" for a dumb but hilarious bit and lost his blue checkmark over it. So that's where the line is, I guess.
I find the analogy between free speech (which he has, literally can say whatever he wants) and a platform being obligated to distribute _everyone’s_ content bizarre.
Does a newspaper publish everyone’s comments? If I call you and ask you to repeat what I say to ten friends will you do it?
Alex jones’s right to talk garbage != his “faux-right” to have platforms publish it.
> I find the analogy between free speech (which he has, literally can say whatever he wants) and a platform being obligated to distribute _everyone’s_ content bizarre.
They can try to censor content published on their site. But they risk losing CDA 230 immunity; in which case they could be liable for everything their users post to their site. They would be liable for child porn, copyright infringement, etc.
Roommate is not immune for publishing materials as to which it is an “information content provider.” A content provider is “any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet.” 47 U.S.C. § 230(f)(3) (emphasis added). In other words, if Roommate passively publishes information provided by others, the CDA protects it from liability that would otherwise attach under state or federal law as a result of such publication.
But if it is responsible, in whole or in part, for creating or developing the information, it becomes a content provider and is not entitled to CDA immunity. As we explained in Carafano, “an ‘interactive computer service’ qualifies for immunity so long as it does not also function as an ‘information content provider’ for the portion of the statement or publication at issue.”
Very true, he has no right to use these platforms what so ever. But by allowing him to remain they are remaining impartial. If these large platforms make the free choice to remain impartial I think that improves freedom of speech. But you are correct the strict definition involves only the Governments involvement in speech.
> I find the analogy between free speech (which he has, literally can say whatever he wants) and a platform being obligated to distribute _everyone’s_ content bizarre
I find it interesting how so many people are unable to stop their mind from automatically, and without their awareness, narrowing the very broad topic of the principle of free speech in general, to narrower and more specific topics like the first amendment, or obligation (by force!) to distribute unsavory ideas (neither of which were mentioned in the comment to which you are replying).
Can we agree that the network effect has reduced the majority of public, mass online communication to a relatively small number of players, most of whom are owned and heavily staffed by people who don't tend to describe themselves as centrists on the political spectrum? Considering this, can you imagine any scenario where perhaps multiple silicon valley companies work in a coordinated fashion to de-platform someone of a political persuasion that they disagree with sometime in the future?
I think we've seen large societies in the past get a little carried away when everyone starts thinking the same way, exposing their minds to only one flavor of opinions, and perhaps harming their ability to think critically. Some people might say we're living within that very scenario right now. No, this doesn't necessarily mean Alex Jones specifically has any redeeming qualities whatsoever, but can you at least see that there is at least something to be said for the general principle of free speech and diversity of ideas?
"Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or sanction."
EDIT: Downvoters, care to share the thinking behind your disagreement? Do you think I'm wrong in thinking that the principle of free speech exists independent of the first amendment, and can be discussed with or without the existence of force being exerted on publishing platforms? Is the very idea of a conversation with those whom you may not completely agree old fashioned or unrealistic?
(FYI I didn't downvote you because you gave a thought out answer, must be other people.)
> ...most of whom are owned and heavily staffed by people who don't tend to describe themselves as centrists on the political spectrum?
The tech companies are _significantly_ right wing on any spectrum including countries outside the USA.
> Considering this, can you imagine any scenario where perhaps multiple silicon valley companies work in a coordinated fashion to de-platform someone of a political persuasion that they disagree with sometime in the future?
If you are saying tech companies should be broken up, I don't have a strong opinion on it. If you are saying that they should be forced to promote conspiracy garbage - I disagree.
> Considering this, can you imagine any scenario where perhaps multiple silicon valley companies work in a coordinated fashion to de-platform someone of a political persuasion that they disagree with sometime in the future?
I hope so, ISIS uses social media.
> I think we've seen large societies in the past get a little carried away when everyone starts thinking the same way.
I disagree that is what is happening here - when Australia's chief scientists was questioned by a conspiracy theorist he said "I like to keep an open mind, but not so open my brains fall out". I think brains fall out delusional fear mongering should be suppressed (not by suppressing free speech, just by people sense checking and only promoting what they want) by the majority, particularly when it has real world impacts like AJ. You could argue the current state of the internet (lots of garbage conspiracies) is an effect of this being short-circuited.
As well, I think your dogma towards "free speech at any cost" is an example of people getting carried away and thinking the same.
Every other western country has free-ish but not free speech, however people are more free from fear and persecution in those places than in America. Consider that AJ is banned from visiting places where quality of life, political engagement, etc is higher than in the USA.
Even if you disagree with my points, what about the company employees' free speech, don't they have the freedom to publish whatever _they_ like?
> The tech companies are _significantly_ right wing on any spectrum including countries outside the USA.
This seems like the absolute opposite of literally every single article I've ever read, I have not once heard a single person make this claim before. Am I misunderstanding something, are we not talking about the same thing?
> If you are saying tech companies should be broken up
I said nothing of the kind, the transcript of what I said is right there for your review.
> If you are saying that they should be forced to promote conspiracy garbage - I disagree.
Once again, I said nothing of the kind, the transcript of what I said is right there for your review.
> I hope so, ISIS uses social media.
Considering:
a) https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
b) What I actually wrote
....does that seem like an appropriate response?
> I disagree that is what is happening here
I am referring to the possibility that if free speech in general is restricted to the point that large portions of the population rarely hear views that might conflict with their own, one possible result might be that they lose the ability to think critically, and perhaps the ability to hold the simplest of good faith conversations with those whose actual opinions may differ only slightly.
> As well, I think your dogma towards "free speech at any cost"
If I had actually said anything of the kind, I would agree with you.
I asked some fairly reasonable questions that 10 years ago wouldn't have been considered controversial at all. I would hope that you and anyone else that comes across this exchange review the words I have written, and the words you have written in response, and try to think calmly and clearly about the nature of this situation. There is something very, very strange going on.
As for free speech, if there's no longer anyone left who is able or willing to engage in an honest discussion, perhaps there's no point in even trying to defend the principle.
1) tech companies employ people at will and engage in profit shifting
2) I did jump to two plausible solutions to what you were describing, true.
3) You did say tech companies shouldn’t be the arbiter of content people put on there. I said I _want_ then to be the arbiter given terrorists use the platform. It’s a fair point that the thing you are saying is wrong has literally been going on for years, and the only difference is that now its someone you disagree with less being censored.
I reread and feel my comments were fair, you are subscribing to free speech at “Alex Jones” cost (effectively any). As well, I am engaging in an honest discussion, we just disagree.
> tech companies employ people at will and engage in profit shifting
Your claim was: "The tech companies are _significantly_ right wing on any spectrum including countries outside the USA". Structuring your company to maximize financial returns is hardly a good representative of the complexity of right/left leaning in the aggregate.
> I did jump to two plausible solutions to what you were describing, true
That's a rather generous characterization of what you wrote.
> You did say tech companies shouldn’t be the arbiter of content people put on there.
Please quote the part where I said that.
> the only difference is that now its someone you disagree with less being censored
This is your imagination playing tricks on you again. Review everything that has been written here, and find the most compelling words I've written that substantiate this claim. I think you might be surprised.
> you are subscribing to free speech at “Alex Jones” cost (effectively any)
Once again, your imagination is projecting ideas onto your mental representation of me. To test whether this is true, review the conversation and find where I said anything remotely advocating "subscribing to free speech at “Alex Jones” cost (effectively any)".
There is a way out of this situation, but it isn't a zero effort endeavor.
>> The tech companies are _significantly_ right wing on any spectrum including countries outside the USA.
>This seems like the absolute opposite of literally every single article I've ever read, I have not once heard a single person make this claim before. Am I misunderstanding something, are we not talking about the same thing?
Maybe broader reading? Tech company management is predominantly "libertarian" and right wing. You often hear Sili Valley leaders extolling Ayn Rand, never hear them extolling e.g. the economic ideas of MLK or even JFK.
"Right wing" applies to many dimensions, not just economics. Companies making economic decisions to maximize returns to shareholders and themselves is pragmatism, not the exercising of fundamental "right wing" beliefs.
If you exclude the economic dimension and consider the aggregate silicon valley stance with respect to the broad realm of politics, would you still maintain there is a right-leaning philosophy?
b) Are you taking the opinion/assertion "You often hear Sili Valley leaders extolling Ayn Rand" as a fact, and believing the obligation is on me to disprove it?
I'd be happy to hear any disagreements about things I personally said though.
Bias is to be expected, after all, even the smartest humans are filled with all sorts of evolutionary extras that may have been useful in the past.
But what's new, and should be obvious to anyone who's been on this site for 5+ years, is the increasingly bizarre nature of these disagreements. Yes, people have always gotten emotional and disrespectful from time to time, but if you pay attention, you may notice a new phenomenon where people are starting exhibit signs of not being able to distinguish the person they're communicating with from an imaginary caricature of the person. People will passionately respond to specific claims, sometimes even fairly complex, that literally haven't even been hinted at by the actual person in the actual conversation. It's like people are arguing with their imagination.
Man, if people on HN can't keep it together, I don't know what to think. It's easy to say this is just how it is online, people in the real world are much more reasonable, and there's a lot of truth to that. But at the same time, I believe the contagion is spreading, and might be even more influential in future elections. And outside of the very rare post like yours (which unsurprisingly has a dim grey color to it), there seems to be almost no support for a voice of reason, at least not ones that happen to dissent in the slightest.
There are plenty of other platforms that would love to have him. Like, say, Stormfront. And the advantage of pushing this crap to those margins is that it denies them legitimacy. Push it out to stormfront (or equivalent) and it's real clear where it sits in the marketplace of ideas.
Leave it on the big platforms and you make it clear that bad behavior is tolerated and rewarded.
Exactly. Governments shouldn't be drawing these lines but someone needs to and corporations are a good choice. If people don't like it they can vote with their dollars. If companies make the wrong move their business will suffer, so they're incentivized to do the popular thing at least. If the wrong thing becomes popular to the majority, then we're all screwed anyway.
Wow is that not true. Corporate entities only have a profit incentive. They are by their nature divorced from morality and the philosophy and ethics of freedom.
When unrestricted, corporations force people into indentured servitude. Corporations used child labor, until they were forced not to.
The freedom to exchange ideas is the most extraordinary and valuable freedom humans have. This is why we absolutely do not trust it to popular opinion either.
Corporations handed control of that freedom would filter and twist expression until only those ideas that profit the corporations are left. We've already seen this in action. The mildest examples are gag orders from lawsuit settlements, suppression of medical research, suppression of safety testing... It's why we have whistle-blower laws.
1. Government - Not a great track record on limiting fringe speech, it seems to descend into totalitarian objectives
2. Institutions/Churches - Not a great track record of tolerating logical speech that is inconsistent with their beliefs
3. Corporations - Capitalism is the best process we've found for spreading freedom of choice.
Nothing is ever perfect, but when 1 & 2 fail to do it right it's catastrophic. When 3 messes up, they lose their own shirts and the damage is more contained.
"Limiting fringe speech" is censorship. I'd rather no one did it.
Instead, air it out, discredit it if it is wrong. When people are forced to stop talking they resort to violence, in the same manner that other species in the animal kingdom handle their disputes. Let people talk.
There's a great quote about this from POTUS JFK
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - John F. Kennedy
Yeah, I'd be shocked if the coordinated banning at other companies doesn't trigger a lawsuit. I'm sure it's in the ToS that they can ban you anytime for any reason though.
But still, where do you draw the line? Tons of hateful content on every platform.
The root problem is that blame and poor reasoning is still seductive to many people. If our first instinct was to ask "How do I know this is true?" until we got to something we could verify outside of the main source itself sensationalists wouldn't have quite the voice they do.
Yeah, gotta make sure you provide him his global platform so he can have his minions continue to harass parents who lost their children in Sandy Hook so they are forced to move far away from their children's graves. Oh, sorry, 'crisis actors'. /s
"Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge" is my favorite work by Karl Popper. His 1945 work on the Paradox of Tolerance seems more appropriate here.
"...as long as we can counter them (the tolerant) by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise"
and
"it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant"
The behaviour that Popper warns about (forbidding rational argument and answering arguments with force) sounds more like the left, than Alex Jones. [2] [3]
This guy lied about mass shootings and encouraged the bullies to physically torment the parents of the victims. But sure, let's treat him as an equal. Twitter is a cesspool.
Maybe what they're referring to is one step removed. InfoWars yammers on about crisis actors, insisting that the parents are government agents or some such (I can't make heads or tails of these conspiracies) and the listeners make their life hell. Here's an article about it, I'm surprised you haven't seen it if you've been following the sandy hook lawsuits.
You've been using HN to comment only on ideology and politics. That's not a legit use of this site, whose purpose is intellectual curiosity, not ideological battle. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use the site as intended, we'd appreciate it.
We eventually ban accounts that use HN primarily for political battle. It will take over the site if we let it, so we can't let it.
I hear/read this regurgitated in many comments about AJ as well as him calling for assassinating President Obama. Yet the evidence for this never materializes. This seems more like poisoning the well to avoid any discussion/argumentation.
It seems that everything was running just fine according to plan until Trump was elected and now there's a huge crusade to use all the technological might of Google, Facebook, etc to shut down whatever caused that to happen and save democracy. I hear a lot of technological luminaries in AI and technology saying the next most important thing that has to be done is to end "fake news". That big tech is hiring in AI to detect "hate". It's a Manhattan project to save the status quo!
Forget slaughterbots, or rogue AI, the real disruptive technology that is going to end the world and requires coordinated action by all the major players is Alex Jones with a social media account!
The media has been highly controlled since the broadcast era with a small oligopoly of federally licensed broadcasters allowed to conduct mass influence operations. Since the 1996 telecommunications act things have gotten more and more centralized till we have 5 companies that control 90% of media, so of course people are looking for other options.
Congrats to Twitter for being the least technologically adept company and thus being kind of garbage at censorship thus leading to them being the vanguard of free speech.
Twitter is trying to hold on to relevance by staying the mainstream medium where demagogues discuss their garbage. The world would be a better place if they kicked off the white supremacists and the jerks, but their stock price would take a hit. To me, it's an easy decision (I'm a shareholder, the stock is already in the toilet), but one twitter has consistently abdicated.
This is such an interesting dilemma in terms of laws and ethics, and there is literally no way out without being shunned.
This is an online business, which laws actually apply? Company incorporation location, account location, reader location? All of them?
Twitter has usage terms, did he actually violate a single one of them so far? If yes, which one? If no, wouldn't it be illegal to ban him without reason based on ToS?
Then there is the interesting question of responsibility. In capitalism it usually boils down to he who has ownership also has responsibility, which is the price for being on the owning side.
So if your small shop around the corner sells Nazi propaganda, it will very likely be closed down.
So why do we treat these so called platforms as if they were a piece of paper? Paper is no business. It just exists, whereas platforms are companies and have intentions. Money is the goal, so responsibility should be there.
Which leads to ethics: all things considered, does an abstract concept such as morale mandate we only accept truth, wisdom, right things?
Finally the biggest question of all IMHO: if we as a society can not rely on the majority making the "right" decision, then does it even matter if people who spread lies are banned since we failed as a society so badly that this is the least of our issues.
It's nothing to do with him, it's to do with the position of head of state or head of government of any country or international political body.
For Twitter to block anybody in such a position would be a step too far into playing an active role in the political process, and would open a can of worms by forcing them into the role of determining which other political leaders or contenders should be allowed or banned.
At least your honest about it. Hypocrites who claim to support free speech and a free society while seeking to silence those who disagree are despicable.
I wonder if there’s a case to be made that continuing to provide a platform to Alex Jones effectively creates a toxic working environment for Twitter employees.
Well, the key element, I’d imagine in such a suit would be knowledge of and active approval of such behavior.
If the executives knowingly and willfully continue to allow white supremacists and people like Alex Jones, then enterprising Twitter employees who fit a certain profile might never need to work again.
Why is it a problem for Twitter if they push the hate elsewhere? Of course accounts publishing outwardly racist or otherwise bigoted content should be banned, just like they'd get insta-banned from HN. That's what makes this a nice place, unlike Twitter.
The informed general public opinion seems to be that Facebook and Twitter have mainstream media-level responsibility, i.e., with great distribution, comes great power, comes great responsibility. They are akin to newspapers in a way in this view, and have a responsibility to only promote reasoned perspectives.
Facebook and Twitter, on the other hand, seem to see themselves more like a grocery store magazine rack, which have carried a wide variety of magazines including conspiratorial BS like the National Enquirer for years without any controversy whatsoever.
These two positions seem to be at loggerheads and operating on completely different planes.