It's not just Twitter, it's also Facebook. (I believe Facebook was actually the first to take action.) What if Google does it too?
In the past few years, we've seen these big tech companies operate in a manner that seems collusive. They follow each other's cues. One company is the first to censor, and then the other companies follow very quickly with the exact same censorship. (The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies.) It's not just one company doing what it wants, it's all the major players doing the same form of censorship.
> In the past few years, we've seen these big tech companies operate in a manner that seems collusive. They follow each other's cues. One company is the first to censor, and then the other companies follow very quickly with the exact same censorship.
Or they are using similar criteria to decide what is allowed, and so independently arrive at the same decision when the same thing is posted to them all.
I was responding to "Or they are using similar criteria to decide what is allowed, and so independently arrive at the same decision when the same thing is posted to them all."
If airline A decides to offer free checked bags, and then a couple days later airline B does the same thing, I would not think they arrived independently at the same decision. Whether they're "colluding" is of course controversial, but there should be no controversy that B did it because A did it.
Is there a "market for censorship"? Perhaps there is. That would be an interesting discussion. But it's not interesting to entertain the idea that Facebook and Twitter independently and totally coincidentally decided to ban Holocaust deniers within days of each other.
(Unfortunately HN put me in the "You're replying too fast, please slow down" state last night so I was unable to reply, and so I'm not sure if anyone will see this reply now. I wonder if that should be called censorship?)
There is absolutely a "market for censorship," because there's a market for everything a company does! That's the whole idea of the free market - every decision a publicly-traded company makes is a participation in the market, and they take the whole state of the world into account as best as they can. When a corporation says "Happy Pride" or "Merry Christmas" or whatever, sure, part of that is the genuine belief of some of their employees, but there is absolutely a decision that doing so is better for the business than not. (Some of this decision is based on whether it's better for the business to make those employees happy. Most of it is based on whether they'll make potential customers angry by doing so or not doing so.)
If social media companies are getting heat in the public discourse for not doing X, then yes, it's a market-based calculation to say to themselves, "If we keep not doing X, our public image will suffer, which is bad for the business, so let's do it." And since the public discourse changes, the market conditions that lead to certain decisions change with it, too. If on December 1 the media gets mad about people not saying "Merry Christmas," on December 2 the market value of deciding to say it has gone up, and nobody would be surprised to see multiple companies react or expect them to have talked to each other before reacting. If last week the media gets mad about Holocaust-denial content, this week the market value of banning it has gone up.
... And there's a more visible form of this which I left out because I thought it was implied by "responded to market conditions": both companies wanted to make an unpopular decision because they think it will be long-term good for their business, but whoever moves first will suffer a short-term loss. As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company. You see this in pretty self-explanatory free markets like competing gas stations across the street: if station A raises their prices, station B is free to raise their prices to match without losing any business relative to status quo ante. So they both end up waiting until they're pretty confident the other wants to raise prices too (which - again - they can judge from the state of the world and not from talking to each other), and then someone updates their signboard, and then the other gas station follows.
It's not collusion when two gas stations raise their prices to the same price. It's how the market works. You can dismiss the fact that the free market is fundamentally an engine of communication as "not interesting" if you like, but that doesn't change how the free market works. It's not coincidental at all - they participate in the same market. But it's also how the market is supposed to work.
> As soon as one company does it, though, that gives cover for any other company.
That was exactly my point! "The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies."
The problem in this case is that Facebook and Twitter are not simply local gas stations. They are two of the biggest social networks in the world, with billions of users. They effectively control a gigantic chunk of the entire market, in a way that is nowhere even remotely analogous to local gas stations. Even if 2 gas stations explicitly colluded, they couldn't hope to control the market, because there are just too many gas stations. You can't drive a mile down the road and find another Facebook. There's only 1 Facebook in the world.
You haven't actually showed that there's a market for censorship, because it's not obvious that censorship is actually financially beneficial to those companies. This is a controversial decision at best, and not really analogous to the price of gas, where the financial implications are clear. I'm not saying it's false (after all, I'm the one who suggested the idea), but it requires more elaboration than "there's a market for everything".
EDIT: Reportedly the US Senate will subpoena Jack Dorsey, so there's already severe backlash.
> The problem in this case is that Facebook and Twitter are not simply local gas stations. They are two of the biggest social networks in the world, with billions of users. They effectively control a gigantic chunk of the entire market, in a way that is nowhere even remotely analogous to local gas stations.
I agree that this is a problem, and I think we need to break up Facebook and Twitter and Google and Amazon and all other large companies, because by their sheer size they distort the free market. But it's worth being precise about what the problem is, lest we make it worse. The problem is not that these particular companies did something unique, and if we let other companies grow in their place they'll do better. The problem is that any market that has companies of this size is distorted and does not function as we want it to function. Today it's this problem. Tomorrow it's something else. Are you going to subpoena Jack Dorsey every time the oligopoly makes an individual business decision that the ruling party doesn't like?
There's nothing functionally distinct between what Facebook and Twitter did and what two gas stations do all the time - the problem is scope. If we start looking for evidence of "collusion," and it turns out (which I hope you admit is at least possible) that there was none because they did the same thing at the same time because of standard market mechanisms, what do we do at that point?
One of the common proposals - making Twitter and Facebook obligated to carry certain content - not only is a practical mess because it cements their oligopoly role and puts the government in charge of determining each new abuse, it also really ought to be a philosophical mess, abandoning any pretense of valuing the free market and valuing liberty.
(Another way of putting this might be, a "free" market without aggressive regulation to prevent anyone from "winning" too strongly will quickly cease to be free, and the "free" market as a tool works well in cases where the barrier to entry is low and the barrier to becoming a giant is high, like gas stations, and less well in cases where the barrier to entry is high and gaining control of the market makes it easier to lock others out ... like Standard Oil. It would be far more liberty-minded to say, once you grow to a certain size, that you must split the companies into smaller independent companies than to say that the government tells you how to run yourself.)
I don't really care about Twitter or Facebook to be honest. It's not the only game in town.
I'd be more concerned if I bought server hosting from AWS, stood up a WordPress blog about my thoughts on capitalism, socialism, sports, and dogs, and Amazon decides to suspend my account due to my writings.
That was a completely different situation. The Wikileaks cables contain marked classified government information that is still considered classified by the US government. (I will not debate whether or not the basis for their classification is valid.)
AWS provides service to the USG, and having unsecured classified anywhere on their servers likely violates the terms of service (between the USG and AWS).
The leaked emails from Hunter Biden's computer were not classified. (Well, at least they weren't marked as classified by a USG entity.) The computer was not "hacked" to obtain the emails either. It was left unclaimed in a computer service shop.
that's precisely why I think journalists and the public sector ought to put their money where their mouth is. Open web standards can be adopted today with the effect of turning any of these groups into their own Twitter. That particular genie is impossible to push back into its own bottle. They had better catch up or get left behind.
The audience will follow. Trust me, I know audiences move around. They've moved around so many times in recent history and since the conception of the Internet.
We should make sure that the media landscape contains a wide range of political thought, including ideas that you or I might individually find wrong-headed and offensive. That's how we ended up with the Fairness Doctrine from the 50s to the 80s, when broadcast media was monopolized to a comparable degree as social media today.
Sure. But that presumably does not mean requiring that The National Review carries articles providing a strong case for "cultural Marxism" or that Marxism Today carries articles supporting neoliberal trade policies. In fact, it presumably doesn't mean requiring that any particular medium or outlet carries anything in particular at all.
As you note, there's even less of a monopoly today than there was 50-60 years ago. So why should Twitter (or Facebook or any other similar medium) require any special attention?
Another reply more or less had the same response I had, which is that it's entirely possible for you to start blogging about certain topics (some could be approached from a capitalism/socialism discussion starting point, even) and be shut down by AWS. I'd like to add a bit more though. Deplatforming is commonplace, by all parties with a platform, and its causes aren't just written comments but also artwork and legal commercial goods.
More than the examples the other comment noted, though, I prefer the depressing/amusing history of Gab as they stepped on just about every single centralized service rake and had it hit them in the face for things some of its user base typed. Going through its wiki history page, I'm even seeing some I missed. Here's a list: Apple (iOS app store), Google (play store), Twitter (API), Asia Registry (domain name), Microsoft (Azure), Stripe, PayPal, GoDaddy, Medium, Joyent (hosting), Backblaze, Coinbase, Square, most Mastodon instances (federation won't necessarily save you) and popular Mastodon mobile apps, Mozilla (Firefox addon), Google again (Chrome addon), Visa.
At the end of the day, yes, anyone can spin up Tor or I2P or Freenet or whatever to talk unhindered, they can participate in commerce with decentralized crypto-coins. And despite the struggles one can still find Gab/4chan/the others on the clearnet and participate in the subset of things that got them in trouble for hosting. It only takes a very moderate amount of active will, and you'll have all you want. That it's not exposed passively to people on other platforms is probably no great loss. Still I think it's worth caring a bit about these things as indicators of changes in culture and, following culture, law, even if you like me don't particularly care much if you're reduced to keeping a private journal because no one will host any of your thoughts because of a subset of your thoughts at some point in time.
I will add one more thing, although not directly related to your comment about deplatforming being commonplace. In banking, we call it derisking ( closing customer's account due to <reason> ).
you know what, that's absolutely true. But you have a better chance of remaining online with your wrongthink than by remaining on a platform such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
These media corporations really should be paying attention to the changing landscape of open web standards. Their entanglement with corporate social platforms for eyeballs will be their own undoing.
If they're really being collusive, then you investigate them for violations of antitrust law or otherwise figure out what they're doing that's breaking the free market, and you fix it.
Alternatively, if every company in a free market seems to believe that X is objectionable, then X is considered objectionable by all of society, and it's not the place of the government to override that. If Facebook bans 419 scams, and Twitter bans 419 scams, and Reddit bans 419 scams, and Craigslist bans 419 scams, a fake Nigerian prince shouldn't be able to lobby Congress for a Constitutional right to force these private companies to host his content. They're allowed to be "collusive" in establishing shared, society-wide norms - that's how society works.
(Or we could conclude that we cannot make the free market so fair as to fairly represent all of society, but as far as the Overton window in the US is concerned, that's an absurdum, and so one of our propositions must be wrong.)
This is not the scenario described. The scenario is that all of these web sites allow 419 scams for years, and then all of the sudden in the same week they all decide to ban 419 scams. That would be really strange, don't you think?
In the past few years, we've seen these big tech companies operate in a manner that seems collusive. They follow each other's cues. One company is the first to censor, and then the other companies follow very quickly with the exact same censorship. (The quick collective action tends to dilute the criticism against any single one of those companies.) It's not just one company doing what it wants, it's all the major players doing the same form of censorship.