I have a wide view of what 'censorship' is, and I include spam filtering in the definition. For example, a while ago I saw an advert for some kind of erection-causing pill on a forum discussing C++. If the forum moderators remove such a post, they make the forum more efficient by saving other users (who are looking for C++ content) from themselves having to filter out irrelevant information / a sales pitch.
I also see far too many 'work from home' adverts in discussions in the Independent newspaper's comment section (on unrelated articles), and if they took a more censorious approach to such comments then the comment section would improve.
To an extent I support censorship, and according to what I believe censorship to be, almost everyone else supports it.
If this very comment had been about some unrelated topic, such as giving an opinion about who to blame or not blame for problems in the Middle East, it would be right for the comment to be censored from this discussion, and it would be censorship from a private company, censorship of a political viewpoint no less.
Here’s the thing. On dedicated forums we know the protocol. We don’t want spam and we don’t want politics.
If it’s a political forum we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally. So a proponent for Owls and a proponent for sawmills both get their say and one doesn’t get “deranked” or de-monetized because it’s not the popular opinion or the au currant opinion. We don’t expect one political candidate to be artificially ranked and another artificially buried in the results.
Now, if I’m on the Hillary blog, yes, of course I expect the org to manage the commentary to fit their narrative. I don’t expect Zuckerberg or Pichai to turn their orgs into the Hillary blog or the Donald blog.
> If it’s a political forum we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally.
The problem here is that bad actors intentionally take advantage of this by supplying an endless stream of 'civil' arguments for entirely abhorrent stuff. This includes usually feigning ignorance and claiming they're 'just asking questions'† when objections are raised, even though it's the tenth or fiftieth or five hundredth time the same thing has come up.
> even though it's the tenth or fiftieth or five hundredth time the same thing has come up
Immediate thought: merging topics is drastically different from closing or deleting them.
Slightly off-topic below:
Generally speaking, I would love a technological solution for QA redundancy. Saw way too many long forum threads that have asked same/similar questions over and over. Not politics and not from bad actors, but e.g. reviews of new devices etc, where everyone and their dogs asks about, say, battery life, every 10 pages. StackOverflow-like QA platforms provide some structure to this, but are limited to objective answers. For example, there's no SO for book plot reviews/discussions and SO format isn't really appropriate there.
Given that there will always be an influx of new people; and that most people will not be familiar with previous discussions, I'm not convinced that most forums are being assaulted by bad actors. This seems to be more of a Eternal September problem.
Of course bad actors can abuse this; though I've always felt it would be good for the derailing comments to be removed with a polite dm message explaining that the topic had been discussed previously with links to said discussion.
It's definitely an organized tactic among some groups. For example, there's a literal neo-Nazi handbook† that advises members of that group to disguise their sentiments in civility and/or 'jokes' in order to sneak it into mainstream discussion.
Any movement can use those tactics. I wouldn’t be surprised if they also read rules for radicals too. Any group looking for influence is going to use tried and true methods.
So while many vile groups like the nazis and others seeking power, there are many other groups who hold unpopular opinions even unpopular and illegal outcomes (as presently held by the public), I’m not sure we want to suppress that. Much of what we have today as acceptable discourse and so on is because we allowed those voices which were considered degenerate or unacceptable one way or another.
We don’t need a new dogma telling us the way to think correct.
> we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally
Define civil :)
Take any hot button issue like guns, abortion, etc. where your stance on one side of the issue can be seen as immoral or life threatening to the other side. Take a passionate / borderline tweet from one side and you'll probably get a 50/50 disagreement on wether or not it's "civil". Now what? Block the tweet? Warn the user? How many people need to complain before it's considered a problem?
Now go a step further and look at the Westboro Baptist Church. They think that they're doing a public good by shaming those who have died (because they believe God punishes sinners and their families with death). They believe it's a sin not to tell the families that the recently deceased is a sinner. They believe they're communicating God's message. Now you'll probably get 99% agreement that it's uncivil. But now what do you do? Silence an unpopular opinion?
The problem is finding out where the line is for defining what's appropriate on a platform and what will be censored. Is it 50% + 1 consensus? 95% consensus? And who gets to decide? The users? The CEO? A board of censors?
These are tricky answers and different countries and companies draw the line in different places. But the devil is always in the details.
It would be nice if everyone agreed on what's civil and what's not, but unfortunately that's not the case.
So the WBC is an extreme case. Obviously it’s problematic. Their tactics are disgusting, and really it’s counter productive to their cause, though they are more like nasty trolls.
But we’re seeing issues where things are not problematic but because people are guilty of thinking “wrong”. If I want to discuss international politics and think we should liberate/invade country X or conversely we should leave country X well alone, I should not get penalized for articulating a point of view.
One thing I don’t understand is, if I follow janeblow@ I should not get offended by her tweets. I have the power to unfollow her, I can block her. I don’t see why people’s reaction id to get janeblow@ suspended.
There are some people on the right and left that think that advocating for foreign war is problematic and counter productive. Some foreign wars in history have been justified and others have been out of greed or racism.
I think the point is we all draw the line in different places on what speech is appropriate which is why censorship itself is problematic.
That’s actually a great example of why viewpoint censorship is a _bad thing_, for everybody, including Twitter, you and me. Look, you and I both know that there are facts that are true that you can’t express for fear of being kicked off of public forums. In fact, even stating that there exist facts that are true but that you can’t express is toeing the line, even though nobody disputes that this is the case. Since you seem to be more or less pro-censorship, I’ll assume that you’re a bit left leaning, so here’s an example that’s suer to make you agree with me: imagine if publishing climate data somehow became (even more) controversial and people sharing (true, undisputed) global temperature readings found themselves being kicked off of discussion forums.
Now we have a situation where we have two sorts of people being deplatformed: the Westboro baptist church and people who think that the world is getting hotter. This paradoxically makes the WBC seem _more reasonable_ by association. Remember, censorship is retroactively self-justified - since it was censored, you don’t know what it is, just that it was something really bad, so it was bad enough to get deleted. We’re better off if anybody says whatever’s on their mind and, if it’s ridiculous, it gets mocked.
Does that leave some people who agree with ridiculous viewpoints anyway, no matter how often or thoroughly they’re debunked? Sure, but there are two possibilities: one, they’re in a small minority in which case they’re harmless or two, they’re actually a majority which suggests that they might actually have a point - and you, representing the intransigent minority, attempting to control them through censorship is EXACTLY why censorship should be opposed.
> Since you seem to be more or less pro-censorship, I’ll assume that you’re a bit left leaning
What gave you that impression? I was raising questions to show that any censorship (or definition of civil discussion) is problematic.
It's a tough problem because bad ideas can lead to bad things, but stopping good ideas can lead to bad things too. If we all agreed on what's good and what's bad this would be easy, but we don't.
I'd much rather live with the consequences of free speech than live with the consequences of censorship. But neither side should project claim it's a utopia.
HN doesn't ban discussion about encryption, which is a political topic. HN doesn't ban discussions about non-state-approved search engines, social media, and VPNs, even though in some parts of the world they're so "political", that they get people sent to "re-education camps".
Twitter's ban on political advertising suddenly reminded everyone how many things besides wars and elections are political. You can't advertise switch to green energy now, because that's about climate change, and that's political.
In practice "politics" ban means you still allow things that are political, but only ones that are ideologically aligned with the status quo.
Peter Thiel expressed a similar well-stated opinion in an interview (can't find it right now) a number of years ago about alleged political censorship by universities.
"I give a Catholic school leeway censor its students or professors to have a Catholic bias. It's on the label.
"It's another thing for USC to censor on a political left or right bias, without disclaiming such bias, or even professing a lack of bias. It's simply a dishonest influence on speech."
Censorship that’s dangerous is usually against an unpopular idea or opinion to the group. Usually when censorship is being discussed, the kind of speech or topics it applies to are already allowed in that forum or venue and there is selective filtering of the content going on outside of what the users themselves choose to entertain.
For instance, if there were a forum specifically about penis pills, and the discussion centered around penis pills, if the moderators selectively expunged certain pill brand mentions or alternative ideas about penis pills from the forum because they personally preferred a over b, or had a personal or business investment in a over b, that is censorship. If you wanted to discuss canaries or automobiles in this forum, they may tell you to move it back on topic. That isn’t censorship.
Similarly, many broad online platforms allow political speech already, it’s just some ideas and people, typically conservative, are being selectively filtered out of the conversation because they don’t want the greater exposure to the alternative but legitimate and contextual ideas or opinions.
That is dangerous. If the shoe was on the other foot politically, it wouldn’t diminish the severity it.
What alternative but legitimate beliefs are being silenced? I'm not following the issue closely, so I've only heard about people like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos being removed from social networks.
Censorship on spam is probably agreed upon by everyone but spammers. Censorship on the opinions of people is dangerous on the other hand. Like I say on HN many times: today it's the opinions you disagree with that get censored, tomorrow it's your voice.
Isn’t that the crux of the issue? A lot of egregious hate speech — say, what Richard Spencer said in the recently leaked audio — is agreed upon by everyone but racists. But every time someone suggests censoring that, people invoke the same slippery slope fallacy. Today it’s the spam that gets censored, tomorrow it’s your voice!
Because the criteria for deciding what speech gets censored is always subjective.
Sure, we can probably find one statement that most contemporary people would agree is wrong and shouldn't be allowed to be said. Like 99.99% of contemporary people.
But what percentage do we cut it off at? 75%? 30%? And why is it a popular vote to begin with? Is morality or ethics something that is relative to popular ideas or are there some concepts that are just plain right or wrong?
I'm not afraid of people saying stupid stuff. I'm afraid of people with the power to curtail speech. Because that invariably gets used against the public.
And "the freedom to do what is right" is not really freedom. You must have the freedom to do something stupid.
That’s my point. What’s the criteria for deciding what spam is? And yet no one complains when comments like “Wow! I made $X from my couch!” are censored — even though that’s every bit as subjective as Richard Spencer’s comments.
Depends on the case, but as far as I can tell, most of the time comments are flagged and removed, it's because too many people disagreed with the poster (including the HN moderators), rather than somebody spamming the site, so yeah, a lot of the moderation here is censorship in any way you could define it. You see this over and over again on public forums: a means of controlling spammers who are not actually participating in what the forum was designed for is introduced and is immediately abused by people who want to limit actual participation.
I don't, because you can still see such comments (it may require an account and flipping a switch). And in fact I browse Hacker News with showdead turned on, and I often start from /active so I can see stories and comments other people don't want me to see. This isn't censorship because Hacker News itself still makes them visible: it's more like spam filtering in that regard, where content is being categorised but not censored.
Spam filters in particular are not censorship because they are ultimately just labelling devices. Because of their accuracy many people often accept and act on those labels automatically, but they don't have to, and actually recently Gmail's filters got terrible and so I have to check my spam folder all the time now.
In some cases spam filters flat-out reject messages and don't even show them to the recipient, not even in a spam folder. I understand the technical reasons for that (full storage and processing of spam is expensive), but, that gets much much closer to the border of censorship, with the only real difference being one of intent.
> If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
Point is, Mill lived in an era where dissemination of information was barely at a steam-engine equivalent, whereas now we've got automated opinion-generating rocket systems in orbit ready to barrage millions of info missiles at any online discussion at any point in any language within 300 nanoseconds.
I started reading through On Liberty recently and I was surprised by how topical it was. This discussion doesn't seem to have changed much over the past 150 years. Mill spends a long time addressing arguments for censorship that I still see used today.
A lot is lost when a book-length discussion is reduced to a single sentence. In his work, there's a very thorough discussion of why this liberty is essential. I don't like how the grandparent used the quote so flippantly. Without the supporting context, it's a baseless statement that encourages low-quality discussion.
One of things Mill did really well is that he thoroughly described his opponents' position before arguing why it was incorrect. You haven't done that, which is why it's unclear what part of his argument is invalidated by improvements in communications.
Here's an excerpt of an argument by Marcuse (by no means the only one to argue against Mill, in fact there are philosophers who question the entire justification for free speech, and I think they have a more interesting point, though they don't directly address Mill):
>Now in recalling John Stuart Mill's passage, I drew attention to the premise hidden in this assumption: free and equal discussion can fulfill the function attributed to it only if it is rational expression and development of independent thinking, free from indoctrination, manipulation, extraneous authority. The notion of pluralism and countervailing powers is no substitute for this requirement. One might in theory construct a state in which a multitude of different pressures, interests, and authorities balance each other out and result in a truly general and rational interest. However, such a construction badly fits a society in which powers are and remain unequal and even increase their unequal weight when they run their own course. It fits even worse when the variety of pressures unifies and coagulates into an overwhelming whole, integrating the particular countervailing powers by virtue of an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power.
> I don't like how the grandparent used the quote so flippantly. Without the supporting context, it's a baseless statement that encourages low-quality discussion.
The context was someone saying they have no problem with users flagging stories, as long as it's not the mods. I disagree, and I might just as well have said "personally, I don't like it either (when some of the hoi polloi take it on them to decide what the rest should discuss, insted of using the "hide" feature)". Instead I said it with a quote.
That doesn't "encourage" ignoring that context, a non-sequitur slogan like "new realities need new quotes", and equating any verbal or written statement, even lies or auto-generated spam, with persons holding an opinion.
For what it's worth, I had upvoted you. The shallowness of the discussion wasn't something you started, and I'm not sure you really had a responsibility to end it. I just wanted to see us do better as a community.
The article isn't speaking against censorship in general. It's specifically about companies that are de facto monopolies. And at the very end it mentions big money distorting the marketplace of ideas. I didn't read anything in the article that would oppose censorship by your C++ forum.
I agree. If you broaden the term "censorship" so much as to make it equivalent to any entity trying to enforce quality or relevance control standards in its own venue, you make the term useless. While also subverting conversation about actual censorship, cheapening it.
I'm not certain there's a strict line between "actual" censorship and OP's definition. Care to give a definition you think is defensible as "actual" censorship?
Sure, it's hard to draw a strict line that will make everyone happy. I'm not going to try. But that doesn't mean that removing ED pill spam should be conflated with the government banning books under threat of imprisonment. We live in a messy world and have to fall back on using our judgment and common sense, flawed as they are.
It's obtuse to pretend that it's confusing why one is acceptable and the other isn't. And it's not helpful to say that the lack of an unambiguous, unanimously accepted definition means that certain clearly reasonable actions can't be taken.
Agreed. Censorship is a simple concept - it's any time expression is suppressed. Those who say that _their_ removal of content _isn't_ censorship are simply avoiding negative word associations, or any inherent suggestion that their judgement could be subjective. Even the censorship of off-topic and spam comments is a subject to a high degree variability in judgement and opinion.
>If this very comment had been about some unrelated topic...it would be right for the comment to be censored from this discussion
By that same logic, we should censor your comment, because this article is not about filtering bot/adspam from small niche forums; It's about mass censorship and manipulation of organic political opinions on platforms with billions of users.
I also see far too many 'work from home' adverts in discussions in the Independent newspaper's comment section (on unrelated articles), and if they took a more censorious approach to such comments then the comment section would improve.
To an extent I support censorship, and according to what I believe censorship to be, almost everyone else supports it.
If this very comment had been about some unrelated topic, such as giving an opinion about who to blame or not blame for problems in the Middle East, it would be right for the comment to be censored from this discussion, and it would be censorship from a private company, censorship of a political viewpoint no less.