“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” -George Orwell, 1984
Please read The Captive Mind for the version based on true events.
Spoiler: the Poles discovered that a political movement with methods and motivations which should sound very familiar didn't turn out to be the good guys after all.
The road to hell is paved with "good intentions". We desperately need to find a globally adoptable alternative to google and the services that it provides. Docs, Sheets, Drive, etc. are fantastic services in that they work really well on a massive scale. However, Google's increasing role as an arbiter of right vs wrong and a steward of information puts too much power into the hands of one corporation, whose best interests are provably not aligned with that of the general population.
I've been working as a SWE at google (in ads...) for over two years and I've really started to loathe it over the past year. The pay is fantastic and it's really hard to walk away from that, but the idea that they are not (or at least no longer) contributing to the better world that I think we need, has started to weigh heavier and heavier on me...
We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information.
I think your fundamental error is in the fact that you think that a private company (and market competition) can fix these issues. It seems that many people on HN are just waiting for the new Savior company, that will magically have incentives to fight for them instead of making money. It's like hoping for market competition create health regulation in the food industry.
Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah, and perhaps the solution isn't in demanding private companies to be your regulators and defenders of good morals and truth. What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries?
The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like.
Consumers aren't rational. Neither are their demands.
I'm probably no more rational than anyone else, but I'm honest that I sure as hell don't want to give money to a service that is happy to host some violent folks content / garbage...
> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like
Please, speak for yourself. I think these companies should host absolutely everything[0]. Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open.
Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.
> Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open.
Were they really though? I'm pretty sure there were plenty of things, especially things deemed to be "Intellectual Property violating", which were strictly banned on all these platforms far before 2010. One example is that Google has been removing search results for as long as I can remember.
In other words, what was in your perspective "free and open" was very restrictive and politically pro-corporate from my perspective --- hardly an "objective stance" but instead a very political stance on what was permitted and what was forbidden.
Ok Youtube for example has had a longstanding policy of removing videos using music clips without the rights (I assume proactively, not just in response to DMA notices). This is essentially an automatic mechanism, possibly overly aggressive, to stay within the law- find unlicensed music and silence the video. But like stopping me from infringing on a Metallica song is clearly categorically different from actually censoring a video about Coronavirus that doesn’t comform to some standard or is accused of spreading misinformation.
I brought up copyright as just one example, these platforms have many reasons (not always given) for deleting stuff, ranging from political content or activism to copyright. Most ToS's are quite arbitrary. People have been talking about this for a long time as well -- "Chilling Effects" turns 20 this year! At the risk of being a bit unkind it seems like it's mostly just conservatives who were "living under a rock" until now, and now suddenly have loads of opinions on it.
I don’t think he was talking about search results. Rather other Google products like Drive. People used to share Hollywood films on Drive, for example.
Huh, I never have tried this, but I'm pretty sure sharing hollywood films on drive has always violated their Terms of Service, although I could see them not being great at enforcement all the time.
If Drive was that permissive, then upload sites that tended to "look the other way", like Rapidshare, MegaUpload, etc, would never have existed.
Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars?
I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. That doesn't mean other companies can't host that data, simply that I don't want any of my dollars to go to those companies.
If the vast majority of consumers also don't want to give money to companies that host that content, that's the hosting company's problem. The free market is speaking. Nobody is making it illegal for that data to be hosted, but nobody is obliged to pay for it to be hosted. So it seems to me that things are working as intended.
That is the point of the free market. But deplatforming certain kinds of offensive content is regressive.
For instance, in the not-so-distant past many Americans found interracial marriage morally abhorrent. Wikipedia says only 5% of Americans thought interracial marriage should be legal in the 1950s. In today’s environment, that leads to deplatforming those who would’ve supported marriage equality. This is not something we would desire.
People are full of prejudices. I’m sure our grandchildren will look back in horror at ours. Let’s not deplatform them for that.
it's sarcasm, sadly these days the main media and our school districts are all about 'equity', teachers are all re-trained to use equity instead of equality right now.
The subtle difference you’re pointing out is significant. Equality under the law is moral and ethical. Forced equality of outcomes is immoral and unethical, and is just collectivist Marxism rebranded.
There's a difference between disagreeing with a position and finding it "abhorrent".
Your evidence with regards to interracial marriages does not support your point. Whether "something can be discussed" is an entirely different question than than "do you support position X". The very fact that they were able to take a poll is strong evidence that talking about it was not verboten.
This is simply not true, and a strange argument. Child pornography is discussed because people find it abhorrent. US politics has largely revolved around the prevention of interracial relationships for at least a century and a half, so the idea that people didn't (and don't) find them abhorrent is bizarre and ahistorical.
It’s not “active” support if the algorithm acts in a content neutral fashion, for example based on engagement metrics. In such a situation, changing the algorithm to artificially not let allegedly-false content be discovered is actively supporting the opposing viewpoints. Leaving the algorithm to act without artificial content-specific modification is not active support. Tolerance would be leaving the algorithms alone.
Former Googler here (11 1/2 years, including in Ads)
The idea that algorithms are "neutral" is laughable. There is a loosely organized group of activists out there who are aware of how these algorithms work and actively manipulate them.
"Engagement metrics" are nothing more than these people pushing the buttons.
I don't really understand why tech companies, like Google, go so far out of the way to maintain the image of being neutral. I agree they have a right to censor content they choose for whatever reason but what I don't understand is why they try appear to be neutral about their decisions. It feels like everyone is aware of what is going on, even other commenters who support Google censorship admit they approve of the bias.
So why do tech companies cling to this line of being neutral when no one really seems to accept it and they themselves have no intention of being neutral? I feel like there wouldn't be any conflict about policies or complaints they have to deal with if they were more honest. Maybe it has to do with section 230. I don't know but I feel like we would be better off if consumers had more information.
Every MITM-as-a-service starts off by being a neutral conduit to attract users, and then slowly adds restrictions to appease advertisers. But users never appreciate additional restrictions, and so Google (et al) have to keep marketing themselves as general hosts lest they lose even more mindshare.
Google is a legal construct. I can’t go have a coffee with Google. I can’t get a high five from Google. Google will do whatever our laws say it has to do in exchange for liability protections for its owners.
If you can find a majority to agree you can change the laws. It seems unlikely though. I’m not even sure what you would change the law to be. Current reading of the US constitution says that Google has the same free speech rights that you do.
They are not there to improve society, they are there to make money, and if you think different you are a fool.
Republicans fought to make companies people, and to be not regulated. And now are crying when it fired back, because forcing a company to publish or block something is actually stepping on its first amendment right.
You won't really have such platform, unless it is done through a well established non-profit or through government (as long as government is Democratic and checks and balances work correctly).
Not "like life threatening" - Bad for our society.
In that free public conversation is centrally crucial to the sanity of our society.
And having that public conversation controlled by a profit-seeking entity is definitely detrimental to that conversation. And thus detrimental to the sanity of our society.
And an insane society is obviously all kinds of threatening.
Again, Google is not stopping you from using your speech.
If they ban you, they are telling you that they don't want you on their private property.
They don't take away your internet connection.
When did society need Google, or Twitter, or FB to function? They do not. Those are simply three websites. There are literally millions more.
If this site banned me, I lost literally nothing. If Google Drive banned me(assuming I have an account, which I do not) I lost literally nothing. Same for FB. Same for Twitter.
The truth of the matter is that the right-wing userbase of HN is deathly scared of being marginalized in wider society. Seeing things like Parler getting kicked off of AWS, Facebook Fact-Checking moderation and now this makes them scared.
That is a problem except that no one gets booted for being conservative, so it is not really a problem.
The top performers on FB are conservative pages for crying out loud!
They are afraid of much, which is the problem. It is irrational fear and based on ignorance and hatred.
Parler earned their ban 1000 times over. When sites get shut down by their hosts because its users were openly inciting violence that is not a problem.
I have yet to see someone get booted for following the platform's rules and merely being conservative. People from all over the political spectrum get banned every day.
I disagree. I think the algorithms are fundamentally immoral because they promote content that gets "engagement". Which includes and in many cases prioritizes content that people have engaged with because it causes a negative response. Rather than pushing good* content, it prioritizes lowest common denominator, reality tv, desperate pundit, fast food, self congratulatory, outrage porn garbage.
*By good, I simply mean thoughtful, high quality, factual, educational, or otherwise uplifting content regardless of politics
I don't think "Good" is unambiguous enough to trust the platforms to promote it. How about simply "related"? Show people the content they've explicitly asked for. If people explicitly ask for outrageous content, then fine, but we needn't force feed it to society.
Algorithms don't work like this though: content that feeds outrage disproportionately outranks content which doesn't.
Algorithms don't discriminate "content" by it's actual content: they keyword match and look for clicks, and build a pretty perfect radicalization pathway more easily then they build a discourse [1].
You have probably experienced this: almost everyone has the experience of wanting to see some particular YouTube video, but opened it in an Incognito tab (or just avoided it) explicitly because they know the topic will prime the YouTube homepage to fill with nothing but things you don't want to see.
I always think I can draw the line in the sand as a very rational and relatively well read person.
But then I remember that the best thinkers the world has ever seen (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, ad nauseum) were never able to look beyond their noses to see the human suffering of others.
Aka, they were perfectly happy to have a society run by slaves, to ignore the plight of the poor and sick, etc.
Perhaps these are the "best thinkers that the world has ever seen" because they said stuff that was beneficial for (some) powers that be. E.g. Plato-Aristotle-line/myth is directly linked to Alexander the Great.
Worth noting that there were very influential thinkers and entire schools of thought that looked beyond their noses. A good example are cynics/Diogenes the Dog, who may well have been more influential than the Platonic line. E.g. (as per anecdotes we have left) Alexander the Great had great respect to Diogenes, who totally ridiculed Alexander's (and Plato's) position.
Also stoics (e.g. Marcus Aurelius) are quite direct descendants of cynics and not ashamed of this at all.
More I look into classical philosophy, or the "myth" of academia, more it seems that it's mostly a fabrication of perhaps scholastics.
This is a very important point. Maybe there were some great philosophers in their time that argued against it and were ridiculed or didn't reach us through time.
I'm curious what you mean by being a fabrication? Their ideas were real and they've shaped history throughout time one way or another
Fabrication is perhaps too strong a term, but the separation between history and myth has not always been that strong. For example it was common (and accepted) to write stuff in some famous person's name.
I don't think it makes the content itself any worse, but it's difficult to know what was really historical.
I don't formally study this, but such problems become quite apparent when I try to e.g. find out historical sources for some philosophical statements or anecdotes. Probably not that different from how people attribute all sorts of "smart stuff" to Einstein.
Edit: by "scholastic fabrication" I mean that scholastics spent a lot of time "interpreting" especially Aristotle (and tried to make it compatible with the Bible). I'm guessing a lot of what we think is "greek philosophy" may be from these interpretations.
Thank you for the clarification. I'll read more on the subject.
History is god damn hard. That's why it's useful to read the source material whenever possible.
I don't know how many times I've seen The Parable Of the Cave being used, but reading The Republic, really makes you understand what Plato meant with that story.
It's hard for most people to read that stuff though. I've only scratches the surface. It's easier to trust others to donor for us and distill the information.
And in each century, the lessons learned from the same material may be different too.
It's usually next to impossible to read the real source material, as it's in literally ancient language and written in context and for purposes that are hard to understand.
For most things it probably doesn't matter that much. For example classical philosophy (or its common translations/interpretations) provides a sort of "shared language" for academia, regardless of how historical it is. That's why I tend to think it more as a myth unless there's something specifically historically intetesting.
Most of the classical stories, e.g. the Cave, have "transcended" the original context anyway, and are in a sense richer nowadays.
You're making the mistake of assuming morality from your current time, place, and culture is universal morality. You find slavery morally objectionable because the current cultural understanding is that slavery is morally objectionable. Future obedm might find it equally abhorrent that you, for example, routinely consumed the flesh of sentient animals or openly released carbon into the atmosphere for personal gain, or probably a million other things that will be completely unimaginable in polite society 500 years from now.
That may be true of Plato, Aristotle, etc. But one thing I have learned from history is that there is almost always a contingent of people that do find terrible things like slavery abhorrent and were even outspoken about it. But if you are an elite, and benefit greatly from something, you are probably much less likely to be outspoken against it.
And then from inside your link, there seemed to be even more critical voices:
"Then again, the Stoics were famous for challenging common conceptions, and the founder of the school, Zeno of Citium, had declared slavery an evil in his Republic"
So now I think it is a shame, that I barely ever heard of him, despite having heard from all the others great (but slavery endorsing) greek minds. And sure, slavery was very common everywhere at that time. One more reason maybe to celebrate early free thinkers?
Most philosophers likely come from the elite classes in the past. You don't have time to sit around and think and write if you have to worry where your next meal comes from.
We’re not talking about individual choice but an inherent ir/rationality in censorious behavior.
Vast majority of the consumers probably make pragmatic rather than idealistic consumption choices. Eg when you source a new iPhone, you source certain unethical labor practices. When you make use of the US dollar, you make use of some amount of atrocities that built its international purchasing power (eg any of the petrodollar wars). I bet those rarely bother even the most so-called “idealistic” consumers because a) it is a hard calculus to compute b) it is impossible to live when every “impure” thing is removed from use.
The difference with public content hosting is being able to twist arms to make them take down stuff and conform to an image of virtuousness which we narcissistically and psuedo-religiously identify with. It is not about the real damage the contents pose, it is our intolerance to being seen as a “person who can use such sites”. The threat is to our confirmation bias, in this case the confirmation of an idea that there is a clear right and wrong and we are definitely right.
I'm confused. I don't see the problem. What's the difference between the image of virtue and just virtue?
If the majority of people believe that images of virtuousness are what they want, then that's just what they want. People aren't computing the outcome, their ethics are based on appearances and always have been. The internet doesn't change that fact. Whether it was in the middle ages or the post-industrial period or today, virtue has always been performative. So I don't really see what you think your argument demonstrates.
The enlightenment concept of free speech is likely a minority viewpoint among the people of the world. However I also think it is the correct view and that corporations or governments looking to censor speech are infringing on human rights, and believe in fighting for it the same as I would fight against racism, slavery, religious discrimination, authoritarianism, and so on. Just because a lot of people believe something is ok does not make it right.
> What's the difference between the image of virtue and just virtue?
What’s the difference between a real car and a perfect cardboard replica? One has functionality and interiority. The other is just exteriority.
In the King Midas story, he wants everything to be mindlessly golden and thus turns them into unusable shiny crap. He got the golden exterior alright, with none of the real goldenness, goodness they would afford him.
Your example is a bit facile. A cardboard car does not function as a car does. It sounds almost like you are saying something but you never explain exactly what’s wrong with performative virtue.
But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”. The young people of today are no less virtuous than their elders, despite the fact that their elders (like virtually every generation before them) complain that they are immoral.
But "performative virtue" is--definitionally--fake. If it were real, it would just be "virtue". (And similarly, "political correctness" is something not quite correct--otherwise it would just be "correctness"!)
It's an actor "performing" as a character for a few hours, and then reverting back to their original personality.
> But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”.
No, strictly speaking you don't have to define anything. Whatever virtue is, it's consistently that. "Performative virtue" is inconsistent, often hypocritical, and therefore inauthentic.
> The young people of today are no less virtuous than their elders...
I can't speak to virtue in general, but with regards to duplicity it does seem like there's increasingly more of it:
1) young people still have access to whatever methods of duplicity old generations had, and can additionally virtue signal on social media on an unprecedented scale.
2) it seems like it's simply becoming acceptable to lie. Politicians will directly contradict their own video evidence, multiple times a day, and everyone shrugs and moves on. We've given up on norms of discourse and civility. To be clear, I'm not surprised that lies are being told; I'm surprised that there appears to be zero interest or any repercussions.
3) objective truth itself is under attack. It's becoming normalized that anyone can say whatever they feel at that moment and that they have "their truth" and I have "my truth". This is incredibly dangerous.
> A cardboard car does not function as a car does.
That's exactly the point. It is contrasting the appearance of the thing vs the structural & functional organization (logos) of the thing. Without the second, it is not the thing. One cannot establish an identity relationship just based on appearances. That is why you can't equivocate the appearance of a virtue with being virtuous.
> It sounds almost like you are saying something but you never explain exactly what’s wrong with performative virtue.
"Performative" virtue, a more accurate designation would be "demonstrative virtue", is an oxymoron. You cannot be virtuous without conforming to the structural & functional organization of the thing, i.e. without really being virtuous. Real virtue is a participatory endeavor. A display of virtuosity is like the cardboard car, it doesn't function as a virtue. Making people take down content for narcissistic reasons does not make the world a better place, because it is devoid of at least two core properties that is rationality and proportionality.
> But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”.
This topic is systematically discussed since Aristotle, and you would appreciate the absurdity of trying to give an exhaustive definition in this forum. But I've given you two properties of it that narcissistic censoring violates.
> Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars?
Can you pinpoint the moral difference between "Google should be allowed to refuse to host content that they dislike" and "Restaurants should be allowed to refuse to serve ethnicities that they dislike"?
It is a feature of free markets that consumers choose where to spend their money; but it is also a feature of liberal societies that the law precludes the majority from driving out an unpopular minority by refusing to do business with them.
> I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent.
Isn't that a sign of a moral panic? Back in the 90s, my parents didn't want to patronize companies that signed deals with pornographers. Even though I was only 10, that sounded ridiculous. Good luck finding any large company that doesn't.
I don’t see what’s changed. Youtube doesn’t host pornographic content either. The Apple App store doesn’t allow adult content of any kind. If you’re saying maybe Youtube and the Apple store should grow up a little and allow adult content I’m sympathetic but the horse has long left the barn on that one.
Can you explain this? Are you referring to tech only? Maybe I’m way too oblivious but of the large companies I pay money to I find it hard to imagine that most are signing deals with pornographers.
If people wont do business with people who do business with pornographers what right do the pornographers or porn aficionados have to object. If it would render it more clear it wouldn't matter if the subject were avocados. It's not a moral judgement on the worthiness of porn its about consumer choice in aggregate.
No, because just a handful of companies control the entire ecosystem. There is no alternative, you cannot escape their influence and you cannot function without interacting with them.
If Google and Apple ban you from their products and platforms, and Visa shuts down your payment processing, there is nowhere to go. You're done. This and much more has happened many times.
You're making the "just build your own internet bro" argument.
Sounds like they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work harder.
They could also accept checks via the mail. Or cash via the mail. Or cryptocurrencies. Or gift cards. Or barter. There are multiple options available to them.
Those things are all really inconvenient.. Really, who wants to go out and mail something and wait for it to arrive? And gift cards risk the same kind of banning of credit card companies. This is going to limit any business beyond inviability.
The only thing you mention there that is a serious alternative are cryptocurrencies. And those are constanly fluctuating, needing very complex hedging against sudden value changes. And still something that most consumers will really struggle with. Most will not have a clue how to obtain crypto or how to deal with it (safely).
It might work for a really highly educated niche, but not for 99% of consumers. They just want to put in their paypal or credit card details and click buy now.
>> I can do anything I want without Apple, Visa, Google and even Amazon and Microsoft.
Really? How can you even know which services or products depend in some way on GCP, Azure, or AWS (not to mention product and services that are built using other services that depend on those)?
But I think we need to examine both sides of this.
When the American concept of free speech was coined, it was valuable because you could go stand in a government owned square and communicate your message for free. It was a good balance between not forcing private companies to accept speech but still allowing the speech to happen.
Online we don't have the concept of a government run square, and so your speech can be totally stifled by private companies.
But the difference is that when you're standing in the town square shouting nonsense, your reach is constrained, your ability to reproduce your speech is low (you have to just stand there and keep shouting) and everyone knows who you are. Damaging speech just can't be that damaging. Online is totally different.
I think the argument of "Google can't censor you, only the government can" is not great because there's no gov't equivalent of the town square. But I don't think the answer is just "make Google accept all speech" or "create a gov't equivalent of the town square" is necessarily the answer either. I think we should be starting from first principles and understand what free speech is trying to accomplish and come up with a framework that helps us accomplish it.
Pretending free speech was only about the town square is ahistorical.
Free speech has always been about distribution as well - publishing a book or a newspaper, distributing pamphlets - those had similar reach to a random FB post or YT video today (in terms of percentage of the population).
Of course newspapers had no obligation to carry anyone's message, but, far more importantly, a newspaper couldn't be censored by government for printing stuff the government didn't like.
It's also important to remember that there used to exist many more newspapers - factories would have newspapers, most towns would have one or two, many clubs and similar organizations would have one.
Historically there were two modes of distribution, "publishers" and "common carriers".
Publishers (like newspapers) had full control over their content, and also had full responsibility for it (e.g., if they printed something libelous, they could be sued).
Common carriers (like the phone company) had no control over the content, and no responsibility for it, either (you couldn't sue the phone company if someone used the phone to plan a crime, for instance).
Google and their ilk want to have it both ways. They want the full control of publishers, and the zero responsibility of common carriers.
Historically, power without responsibility has invariably been a recipe for abuse.
I think they should have to choose one or the other.
That’s the way it was until the passage of the communications decency act. Early social networks found themselves in a bind in that if they tried to moderate for say, spam, or porn, or copyright infringement, they were then liable for everything their users published. The CDA was an attempt to solve that problem.
The impact of that is asymmetrical, though. A company that's making 1% profit (thinking a rural TV station here, not necessarily Google) can't afford to lose 10% of it's viewers, so they dial down their programming to the least objectionable possible. That's how we get in a situation where most people want to watch Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones but what they get are Brady Bunch reruns.
There's little free market for the consumers in tech in general. The barriers to entry are extreme - between inherent complexity of the products, enormous capital investments required, and scale-related benefits (economies of scale, network effects), few can afford to start a real competitor. You can't just make a new Facebook or a new smartphone or even a new coffee machine - not without making a faustian bargain with investors, a deal which is usually the root problem behind why technology sucks.
Consumers only get to choose out of what's available, and in this market, it's hard for an entrepreneurial consumer to make some things available when the market isn't providing them.
The analogy to voting to flawed in that actual voting is much too powerful, because it involves politics and the use of force. When you "vote" with your dollars your choices are to either support something or ignore it and spend your money somewhere else. The amount of support you can provide is limited by the economic surplus you've created, and no matter how much money you amass you can't just shut down something you dislike as long as other people continue to support it. Voting in the political sense lacks these safeguards: a majority (or vocal minority) can subsidize their pet projects with the opposition's resources, or prohibit harmless activities merely because they find them distasteful.
What? So because someone or something has more money than us, we should just say screw it and buy products we are morally against? That makes no sense.
> Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.
The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn. So I’d rather let individual companies decide where they draw the line and if that happens to be not where you’d agree, then you can go support an alternate, if this there are many, who draws the line elsewhere. And for those who don’t want a private entity owning the infrastructure, there is always solutions like IPFS.
> The thing is, people are never going to agree where the line is drawn.
True, but I currently trust the line drawn by the law orders of magnitude more than I trust the one drawn by a bunch of faceless reactionaries at a handful of megacorps.
Also, theoretically, I can participate in changing the law when it's either insufficient or overbearing. I have zero say in the corporate policies of the day.
If you can determine that a particular piece of information belongs to some unpleasant or dangerous category, mark it as that, like a spam filter does, or vaguely how FB does with posts. Importantly, do not remove it unless the law forces you to.
Then let users switch between the filtered and unfiltered view, or look at the analog of the "Spam" folder.
This allows to study pieces of information that are deemed "controversial" or even "malevolent" and make your own opinion, if you're so inclined.
Even more, it could apply several different cultural filters, like "content likely offensive for X", where X is a major religious or cultural group, much the same way as many providers currently mark content as inappropriate for children.
and then there will be a million "Top 10 things the government doesn't want you to know" videos that amplify whatever it was they were trying to censor
The Govt pontificates about big tech issues without putting in the effort of making laws. Big tech is forced to anticipate what might defame them or be used by the Govt as ammo to garner public sympathy. It is a delicate balancing act between censorship and freedom.
Zuck tried to put the onus on the Govt to define right and wrong, true and false, but to no avail. It is hard to please everybody unfortunately.
I really don’t see the hard part. Just because we consider something to be harmful and negative (like propaganda) doesn’t mean making it illegal is desirable.
Even for the things that are illegal, it can be illegal to publish something but legal to provide connectivity services to the offender.
I apologize if I missed your point, but in the case of fake news for instance, iiuc, you're arguing that fake news on FB is legal and that FB isn't responsible for such content on their platform.
Information warfare is fairly real and potent in how it has weakened US democracy and vaccination efforts recently. Ultimately, arguably, this has real consequences for the economy, national security etc.
I am not saying that FB is not responsible. I am saying that FB should not have their services blocked by ISPs or government because of fake news on their platform.
You're correct in your observation but state-sanctioned censorship is not the solution.
In case we're talking around each other; what kind of laws would you like to see put in place?
> So user generated fake news is ok, and so is foreign propaganda influencing elections?
I mean... yes? People are ultimately responsible for their own worldview and vote. They are also perfectly entitled to consume any information from any source they please, aren't they?
A side note: foreign propaganda is not worse than domestic propaganda. Swarms of dedicated activists using rioting and other violence to achieve political goals (the dictionary definition of terrorism), in collusion with a sympathetic tech industry that suppresses any dissenting thought, is propaganda and it does influence elections. When these companies do things like ban Trump, they are illegally making a campaign contribution without abiding by the laws of campaign finance. When they do things like censor discussions of the lab leak theory, they propagandize the entire world by freeing the CCP of the bare minimum for accountability.
I am not a fan of any approach here and largely agree with you.
Media censorship did very well exist in pre-tech journalism as well and was more blatant. Eg. Iraq war WMD claims etc. Big tech censorship mirrors this but in a very limited manner since we know it is happening at any point in time and such information is available outside of the major platforms, which wasn't the case pre mainstream internet.
Ultimately, big tech regulation of content is similar to how a WSJ or NYT would manage what they publish. They've been forced into this position with all the criticism over the last few years - it isn't something they wanted to invest in. It looks more like censorship because of the stepping back from the previously laissez faire approach to content, whereas NYT's baseline was self regulation (so it wasn't as apparent). Big tech media is privately held like a bar or a restaurant and in my opinion have every right to control who is on the platform and what is not ok to say - if one doesn't like it - they can leave.
If you live in a more populous state like California, you have much less voting power in the Senate and somewhat less voting power in the house and the executive office.
I can much more easily leave a company that I don’t like than the government. A company does not have the power of the state to impose its will on me.
This is the same government that less than a year ago wanted to come down on Saturday Night Live for being mean and is passing laws on the state level right now to forbid teachers from teaching history that doesn’t conform to it’s world view.
It never ceases to amaze me that people want to give the same entity more power that can and will actually take your freedom away.
> A company does not have the power of the state to impose its will on me.
No, but it may have the economic power of a (near or total) monopoly to do that which - depending on the time and the place - may be more powerful than the state.
I don't think it's hard to extrapolate from current conditions. Corporations are currently quite powerful - they control the main lever of politics, which is money. They are already using those levers to bend governments to their will, and utilizing pet governments to produce favorable tax conditions in certain countries to reduce their contribution to others. Eventually, there will be small governments that are almost entirely puppet states of large corporations. Eventually those corporate states will grow and consolidate and you'll live in a world where corporations have as much or more power than some small legitimate countries, then some medium ones, then eventually some large ones, and finally more power than anyone else.
Corporations like amazon and google might not be self-perpetuating due to the entropy concentration inherent in companies that get that large but imagine if you had a organization of that size controlled by an AI officer team. It'll happen, just a matter of how long it takes.
So I listed all the things a powerful government can do - control the media to enhance their worldview and threaten to take away private party, arrest and kill innocent people with immunity, take away freedom over petty crimes, etc.
And I should be more worried about corporations evading taxes?
I can tell you I’m much less worried about walking into any of the Big Tech companies and being treated unfairly than I am driving down the street and being harassed by instruments of the government.
As far as using AI to discriminate. Law enforcement and the government has been discriminating for hundreds of years. They don’t need AI to decide to harass me.
The easiest answer for all these problems is decentralization and choice. Google and other tech companies are effectively governments. They hold power and influence over billions, are insulated from competition by network effects, and also regularly act in monopolistic ways. They need to be broken up and regulated.
Can any of these companies arrest me because I “fit the description” or take away my life and liberty? It’s a fact that because of the way that the US is setup between the electoral college, two senators per state and gerrymandering it’s not “majority rule”. This isn’t political. It’s the Constitution as designed.
Until tech companies can take away property via imminent domain, money via civil forfeiture, or put me in jail, they are not anything like the government.
A. Private companies cannot force you to do a single thing! Governments have entire agencies and departments dedicated to keeping people they deem dangerous in line, using a list of powers up to and including the right to take their citizens lives, if they do choose. No private company has this kind of power! Not even close!
B. People are not empty vessels, free to be molded by wiley corporate villains. People possess values and opinions, and (much to the chagrin of both corporations and politicians) it is very difficult to change people's minds.
I’m a European so I’m usually one of the first to defend legislation of companies. But when it comes to censorship that should entirely be down to the platform. Some platforms might have a no nudity policy, some have a zero trolling rule. Others call fair game to all of the above. Different people like to engage on different levels: some are into high brow arts, others just want to trade stories about getting smashed on drugs. And there’s a whole plethora of interests in between from mums talking about the different shades of brown their kids have squeezed out this week to teenagers talking about nipple slips. None of them have any less right to talk in a safe space than the other. So why should there be a law disclosing what people can talk about?
Ok, I agree that Q Anon, anti-vax chat and so on and so forth causes more harm than good. But is it really the governments place to dictate that? What if the government was the one setting these narratives (not that hard to imagine given Trump and Johnson are two of the biggest serial liars in western political history)? Remember Trump threatened to shut Twitter down because Twitter fact checked Trumps post about election rigging.
For free speech to work, you absolutely need companies to be responsible for what they consider acceptable content rather than the government to dictate it.
" Some platforms might have a no nudity policy, some have a zero trolling rule. Others call fair game to all of the above. "
If this all came with a duty of interoperability, I would be fine with that. But walled gardens that do their utmost to make leaving them really unpleasant and possibly expensive to the users ... that sounds a lot like coercion. And European law usually recognizes that individuals coerced, even softly, by large businesses, need protection.
That’s a separate problem though and should be handled like so. Dictating in law what content independent platforms can and cannot disallow doesn’t solve the walled garden problem. It just places greater challenges on new entrants / would-be competitors while still allowing walled gardens to exist. Plus you also then lose the diversity of TOS that might attract new users to new platforms. It’s a lose/lose outcome that doesn’t even attempt to solve the problem you’re identifying.
The problem is that these companies are open and free until the point where they gain a significant network effect. Once they are in a position to aggressively eliminate competition they start appointing themselves as the arbiters of truth.
I agree that they should be able to change their policies but if they are going to edit content then they should be treated like any other publication that has editors and be held legally responsible for the content that they publish.
A better approach would be to give the user an option to select between filtered and unfiltered content on install with the default being unfiltered and the filtering being provided by the users preferred third party entity.
The great thing about the internet is if you don’t agree with Facebook, Twitter or Google’s TOS you can use another platform or even publish your own platform.
People might talk about FAANG as having “monopolies” but the web was built on independent Joes hosting personal websites and if the content is good then people will eventually find their way there. And we’ve seen the rise of other social platforms precisely because people have felt they wanted to communicate under differed TOS, so this isn’t even a theoretical point.
No, they should host everything until legally obligated otherwise. If CP was legal they should host it, and if you have moral qualms with that notion you should write your local representative and let them know what content should be regulated.
People join specific social groups because of conversational bias. It might be a mums group where the content is mainly baby related. Or a theatre group with talks about fine arts. Or a retro gaming group that talks about old computer games. They will have policies in place to ensure the content of their group stays focused. Some groups will be aimed at families or being safe for work so might have a no nudity rule. Some might have a no trolling rule because they want a friendly atmosphere. Some might have a no sales rule because they don’t want their group to turn into yet another market place. These are all TOS, censorship rules if you will, that are placed in specialist groups.
Your reasoning would say I could join a kids cartoon group and post extreme pornography because it’s legal and if any parents object then they should have the law changed to ban porn for everyone.
Quite obviously that’s a dumb way of managing online content. Let the platforms manage what content they deem appropriate for their specific audiences and if you really want a zero-censorship community then you personally should join one rather than forcing every man, woman and child into wading through the same content you personally enjoy.
The same way we regulate any business and mandate they abide by regulation. Or the same way we force phone companies to be regulated as common carriers. The same way your power utility cannot cut you off based on your political opinion. All it takes is political will.
I'm not entirely sure that's the best model for today, but that's the historic model for a private business that's compelled to allow all legal speech. That's why UPS and FedEx still have to deliver to the New Order (the current incarnation of the American Nazi party).
I partly agree with you. But who gets to make those decisions at Google and what happens to your data when they do? These massive corporations have found that they don't need to value customer support and that includes immediately blocking you from everything you have at their discretion.
Does it really matter who? The point is it is a corporate term of service and if anyone doesn’t like it then they’re free to use another platform (of which there are many).
> what happens to your data when they do?
That’s a more interesting question. In an ideal world everyone would have offline backups of anything posted online but clearly that’s an unrealistic expectation. I’d hope the platform would offer its users a path to migrate off, even if their account has been publicly banned. Sadly history has demonstrated that’s almost never the case.
Maybe that is where the government legislation needs to be? Stating that banned accounts have a grace period to back up their content?
> These massive corporations have found that they don't need to value customer support and that includes immediately blocking you from everything you have at their discretion.
I agree but that’s a tangential point and legislating that Google et al host any content and all legal content wouldn’t fix the customer service problem.
Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0.
But I agree, platforms should be neutral. And people should still strive to control as much of their online properties as possible. Not just give it to Amazon and Google.
> Well then 00-10 was the platinum age. Few behemoths, lots of smaller companies, less focus on marketing and money, fewer idiots online, a focus on hosting your own stuff from 0.
Eternal September was 1993. maybe this golden age of the internet where everyone was civil and educated and almost nothing was subject to censorship didn't really exist.
To you it's a golden age, to others this is a period where the internet was thoroughly weaponized by misinformation agents to undermine democracy and civil societies around the world.
> to others this is a period where the internet was thoroughly weaponized by misinformation agents to undermine democracy and civil societies around the world.
If you said something like this in the 1940s, you'd get a bunch of people nodding their heads in agreement and using it to justify the McCarthy hearings.
Maybe I'm naive, but I still believe the lesser of the two evils is to err on the side against censorship.
Also, if you've spent any time with crazy conspiracy theorists, you'd know that letting the government/corporations/media act as censors just adds fuel to that fire.
Conspiracy theorists have spent the last few years literally using the term "the good guys" to describe the federal government, and were clamoring for a military coup up until earlier this year.
The conspiracy theorists I know, and most of r/Conspiracy, went from distrusting the government to generally converging on Qanon conspiracy theories, and Qanon adjacent conspiracy theories like #SaveTheChildren.
They use the term "the good guys", literally those words, to describe those in the federal government who are supposedly fighting a secret war against a pedophile cabal that will culminate in a military coup.
Interestingly enough, even those conspiracy theorists who haven't fallen down the far right conspiracy rabbithole are also assuming the federal government and military are on their side. A popular conspiracy theory is that the government is gearing up to disclose that UAP reports are actually evidence of alien contact. In those that hold this view, there's a widespread reverence for military members' testimony, and an almost implicit assumption that they are nearly infallible because of their military training. Instead of distrusting the government, they're eagerly awaiting for it agree with them and confirm their personal feelings towards reports of UAPs.
But isn't the flip side of all this censorship a reduced ability for people to tell bullshit from reality?
Why is information intelligence not taught in schools?
Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant. There will always be a group of nutters who believe in flat earth, that vaccines cause autism, etc... Trying to cut that off at the source just throws these people into underground cults. A more scalable, sustainable solution is to
1) teach people to do their research - properly, as in, don't go on Facebook and join "Flat Earth Society Boston" to find The Truth
2) teach people it's okay to change their minds - part of this spreading cultism is that political opinions are now core identities
3) teach people to tolerate opposing viewpoints, even the silly ones - point and laugh, but don't try to cancel and destroy their lives
Another thing - every time a tweet or document is censored, the replies are generally cut off as well. How can people learn to distinct true and false if they don't get to see examples of people being wrong and corrected.
>But isn't the flip side of all this censorship a reduced ability for people to tell bullshit from reality?
No. People have limited processing cycles in their heads, and you never notice the bullshit you fall for, so you can't correct for errors you're making. Critical thinking skills are great, but they don't provide you expert-level knowledge in every field, nor can they. Sometimes your educated heuristics are just plain wrong and someone else has better information you don't have access to. I see this all the time here with content in my field - developers just get law wrong all the time.
You might remember an era when email inboxes were FLOODED with a deluge of dick pills, get rich quick schemes, Nigerian prince scams, and other low-effort, low-value content. Sure you might be able to avoid clicking on garbage, but the general health of your inbox declined dramatically.
Does that mean society is going to end because we've trampled upon the rights of the latest Cialis replacement to spam my inboxes? Probably not.
You have Johnny, saying you should wear a mask when you go to the store, because it helps you against covid. And Bobby says you shouldn't, because there's no evidence it helps, and it might even be even worse for you, if you wear it wrong.
So you're suggesting we should remove Johnnys fearmongering, conspiracy post, because we should listen to the experts?
Experts clearly say that "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly,"
Expert knowledge by WHO.
...and a month later, we should delete Bobbys post too? Do we undelete Johnnys post?
This is actually pretty interesting because your post is premised upon a massive misreading of what actually happened. It shows you can spread disinformation while thinking you did your research.
The expert knowledge was that mass usage of masks early on in the pandemic could prevent frontline healthcare workers from accessing needed supplies while logistics spun up to meet demand.
"There also is the issue that we have a massive global shortage," Ryan said about masks and other medical supplies. "Right now the people most at risk from this virus are frontline health workers who are exposed to the virus every second of every day. The thought of them not having masks is horrific."
This is literally the third paragraph.
When community spread began to drive the bulk of new infections and we've had months to spin up production on masks, obviously mass adoption changes in value.
I literally quoted the paragraph, where they said that there's no evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit.
They didn't say "it helps, but we're unable to call wallmart and buy all their stock, so we're asking you not to buy them, so we can", they said that there's no evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit... those are two different things.
The very next statement by Dr. Ryan "There also is the issue that there is a massive global shortage, and where should these masks be, and where is the best benefit? Because one can argue there's a benefit in anything, and where does a given tool have it's best benefit? And right now the people who are most at risk are frontline health workers [...]"
The follow up statement is also very emphatic that this is about mask allocation due to constrained supply. I don't get why you're trying to ignore the very clear context of the statement.
There was evidence of the effectiveness of masks. They chose to diminish/ignore that evidence because it was inconvenient to protecting the supply of masks.
There were two studies circulating around that time. One of passengers of a bus and another of a restaurant. The bus one found that the passengers wearing masks did not catch the virus and many of those that did not wear masks did catch it. The restaurant one found that people in the flow of AC air caught it and those not in it did not. That meant that it was airborne and there was some evidence suggesting mask effectiveness.
Why should you listen to the CDC, WHO, etc… when there is a better predictor of reality?
You seem to be making an argument from authority by leaning on experts, and I don’t fully disagree with that approach either. But trusted authorities regularly betray trust, and use their label of expertise to push their own agendas. A recent example is found in the false attribution of the PNW heat wave to climate change (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/flawed-heatwave-repor...). They also can be wrong solely due to making a mistake (COVID had many examples of this with rapidly changing guidance). So you aren’t free from the need for critical thinking skills, because in the most important matters you have to still challenge them. To be able to do so, you need to have trained that muscle beforehand.
>You seem to be making an argument from authority by leaning on experts
I don't think that's the core of what I'm saying. I'm saying people have limited mental time, so devoting an unlimited volume of time to sorting through bullshit is not feasible.
Everyone is going to need to make choices, but if statistically the options presented before them are better, we'd expect better outcomes in general.
'Critical thinking' is one of those things that people keep raising as the catch all solution. This line of reasoning states that it doesn't matter what options are on offer because people will calculate the best ones! Unfortunately, they don't.
Most of our language fluency tests rate people's skills in this area; take the ACTFL scale for instance. The sad reality is that when people are provided with language based reasoning testing, many people perform fairly poorly due to common errors, even in test-based situations. People misread statements, misunderstand their meaning, have trouble moving from specific to general or vice versa, have difficulties tailoring their message to their audience, etc.
In general, the very HIGHEST level of linguistic ability in specifically tested scenarios is what we assume out of everyone as the baseline when having these discussions about social discourse. This is an unreasonable starting point.
I tried reading the article you linked to. I honestly can't get past the intro:
As noted above, the first bullet of the main findings states that the heatwave was "virtually impossible without human-caused climate change." Sounds very certain, doesn't it? Virtually impossible.
Then read their next bullet:
"The observed temperatures were so extreme that they lie outside the range of historically observed temperatures. This makes it hard to quantify how rare the event was"
On one hand, they say it is hard to quantify how rare or unusual the event was, but on the other, they claim the event was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.
Both statements can not be true. You can't be uncertain and certain at the same time.
What? The writer seems intent on purposefully misunderstanding the study. "This makes it hard to quantify how rare the event was" is equivalent to the situation of not being able to speak about a "100 year storm" because there haven't been any storms that strong in recorded history. In other words the data is so different from historical data that there's only one reason why: human-caused climate change.
If you can’t get past the intro, I would say respectfully, you’re not giving it a fair chance. You should read the full post and the underlying study being critiqued before judging it.
> In other words the data is so different from historical data that there's only one reason why: human-caused climate change.
No that’s not the case. This PNW event would have happened with or without climate change. The study being critiqued used a hyperbolic claim that the event was “virtually impossible without climate change” even though their own data shows it was virtually impossible (highly improbable) either way, and that it was more due to a rare coincidence of many factors. The Professor who wrote this post I linked also has prior posts analyzing this event and showing that really climate change contributed a few degrees to the peak temperatures, but that it would have been a record breaking event either way.
As you can see here, the purpose of climate change denialism isn't to convince anyone. It's just to delay serious action for as long as possible using handwaving and appeals to authority. Here, the fact that the author is a Professor [sic] is used to add weight to his arguments, even though a vast majority of "Professors" acknowledge that climate change is real.
Their next claim is that the June heatwave was enhanced by 2°C by global warming, which is not out of the realm of possibility.
But think about it. Considering that they state that the heatwave had maximum temperatures 16-20°C warmer than normal, by their OWN ADMISSION only about 10% of the heatwave was the result of global warming. Thus, a record-breaking, unique heat wave would have occurred without global warming.
Imagine if they had stated that. You would not have seen many headlines: Global warming contributed 10% of the heatwave!
This guy is frankly so wrong and misunderstands what he's talking about so badly that he should be completely ignored and you should not cite him any more.
Imagine that global warming dries out a forested area to the point where it catches fire due to being so dry. This guy is saying the equivalent of "the fire burned at 800°C, and global warming only accounts for 0.25% of that!"
I gave the article a fair chance, and facepalmed repeatedly at his inane arguments. He's a crank and you should ignore him.
Sure, but in the meantime the misinformation voters get to pick the textbooks. This is a bit like educating people in fire prevention when the forest is already ablaze.
> Much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to nonsense so that we're constantly vigilant.
No: much like an immune system, we need to be exposed to vaccines (i.e. education on how to spot deception, knowledge of what scams are currently going on). Enough people trying to deceive you, and eventually someone will succeed.
Indeed, and that was also the period where Reddit happily hosted a whole bunch of extremely tasteless and borderline illegal communities centered around things like pictures of overweight people and sexualized children.
A quick googling suggests that the first wave of closures was in 2015 [1] after a crushing wave of negative publicity and advertiser pullouts. The other really high-profile one was r/The_Donald, which wasn't closed until 2020 and even has its own Wikipedia article. [2]
> But certainly prior to June 2015, there was much, much broader tolerance for racist, sexist, transphobic content on the site.
And now it has moved to other, more hidden platforms, where there is noone to write counterarguments, and sometimes (tor, freenet,...) impossible to identify someone who writes actual threats and not just "yo momma so fat..." jokes.
I mean, that's literally what most of the posts are arguing for in this thread— that this needs to be a watershed moment to get serious about distributed, uncensorable alternatives to products like Google Drive.
But in any case, "people will find alternatives" has never been a valid reason not to act (either here or in other popular cases such as guns/suicide). There is real value in having standards of conduct that go above and beyond the bare minimum of "not illegal." Moral and ethical value, of course, but also economic— in the reddit case, ultimately being a place that was viable for ad spends by mainline brands who wouldn't want to be associated with a site whose public image was that of being a safe space for hate speech.
Google is a little different since there's no r/all page for GDrive that can be gamed to show this content, and nor is Google likely as worried about the safety of its reputation as an advertiser.
I think this is one of those things that sounds nice on the surface but isn't really tenable in reality.
Should they only host or also surface "everything"? Is deranking something censoring? What about not promoting something? If the idea is every thing is given equal weight, then things pretty quickly becomes a cesspool.
+1 I have never been “outraged” by something posted on the Internet. Disgusted, disappointed or shocked, sure. But in no case did I think the hosting company was somehow responsible for it.
> Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open.
It was in the early part of the 2010's that Google, Twitter and others started censoring Islamic content in the name of antiterrorism and stopping the spread of extremism on their platforms.
A straightforward reading of the 1st Amendment indicates that there can be no such thing as illegal content under US law, including whatever you are right now considering proposing as an exception. An act involving speech may be illegal; if you make a credible threat of imminent, irreversible harm others are free to take you at your word and defend themselves—the justification here is the harm which is reasonably expected to follow, not the content of your speech. If you lie to someone to obtain their property under false pretenses, knowing that the lie precludes any "meeting of the minds" and thus renders the contract invalid such that the property still belongs to them, then you are committing theft. Your punishment derives from the act of taking property which did not belong to you, not the fact that you lied in the process. And of course what you say may be used as evidence against you without the speech itself being illegal.
There are some more problematic areas where the Constitution itself is inconsistent. Copyright should not exist, for one; the core concept is utterly incompatible with freedom of speech. The Supreme Court even recognized this at one point—it's why we have the concept of "fair use" in the first place—but "fair use" is a poor compromise which does not fully negate the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have one clause saying that Congress has the power (but not the obligation) to do something which would infringe on the freedom of speech, and another clause later passed as an amendment saying "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech", the obvious reconciliation of these clauses is that Congress is barred from exercising that enumerated power because it would violate the later amendment. The Court tried to strike a balance instead… but it still amounts of Congress passing a law which abridges the freedom of speech, despite the limitations imposed by the Court.
There was one other notable exception to free speech that undermines your point: obscenity is not, or has not been, considered speech under the terms of the free speech amendment. So, at least historically, there is some precedent for considering that some forms of human expression can be censored on their own merits.
I should note that I am anti-censorship and consider such laws absurd, but my point is that we can't rely on readings of the constitution to self-evidently protect us from such things.
Many poor precedents are grounded in strong emotional reactions at odds with basic principles, and in my opinion obscenity cases are a good example of that. Still, the classification as obscenity is more about the form of the speech than its content. In fact the more content there is, in the form of either expression or artistic value, and the more the form contributes to accurately conveying the content of the speech, the more likely it is that the speech is considered protected, even if the form would otherwise be considered obscene. I'd rather the courts didn't get involved in trying to decide whether a controversial turn of phrase has enough merit to warrant protection, but in any case I don't think you can extend the principles underlying prohibition of obscenity to exercising control over which information can be conveyed.
obscenity is not, or has not been, considered speech under the terms of the free speech amendment.
What part of "shall make no law" isn't clear? It's true that obscenity is an exception to 1A, but that's something that some people made up after the fact, in direct contravention to the framers' stated intention.
The founders weren't short on ink. If they had wanted to equivocate, they were certainly free to do so. The fun really starts when some people decide that their (least) favorite amendments are subject to less (more) interpretation than others.
The law where? That is part of the problem. Every piece of content would need to have hundreds of flags, one for each jurisdiction in which the content could be viewed. That may not be enough for some countries given how easy it is to fake your origin address. It's solvable but not an easy problem.
I say allow even CP. Take the whole system of control right out of the equation. Make the service 100% free, like sunshine, warming saint and sinner alike.
Then, after we have that working, and we want to remove the CP, find another way. Do it on the client side or whatever.
> Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.
Self harm, terrorism, revenge porn, fabricated news. Just to name a few.
Internet is very different from what we experienced in the 90s. The ingress barrier guaranteed good content (or at least entertaining content). Now the barrier to content submission has been lowered so much that really anything makes on the Web and this is not good. There are reasons, after all, for having locks on entrance doors, right?
I am quite happy that Google "got the message" from regulators that misinformation is a real danger and we should apply zero tolerance to web polluters.
> To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.
And, just to make the point of how hard it is to get consensus here, I'll disagree with you about the CP under some conditions.
I think others will too.
For example some would say that voluntarily made CP (e.g. 17 year old's nude pics) should be uncensored, others might just include an exception for simulated images, still others would say allow everything as long as there's a very low likelihood of victim or victim's connections stumbling across it and no money is changing hands.
It seems like consumers can't agree on why they are upset with these companies. I don't even think we can agree that a private company shouldn't be making decisions about what information should be allowed or removed.
In America it shifts it to the US constitution, which provides a more principled approach to speech than the biases of tech companies. Is it a perfect solution? No. But it is closer to it than the present situation.
Very little beyond CP seriously. Why do you think the sufferinf of an abused child is somehow the only horror we should censor.
Religious domination, violent intimidation, subtle suggestive manipulation, outright marketing lies, even government propaganda should all be censored to some extent to just be within the law
These plarforms must be editors and yes it means less trash / second being published.
>Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.
Within the law of which country?
Should copyrighted content be blocked in the US? What about in the Netherlands?
Should Holocaust denying content be blocked in Germany? What about in the US?
Should anti-CCP content be allowed in China? What about outside China?
If you want to do the bare minimum according to the law, you are going to need a different implementation for every country. And even then people in countries with more lax laws are going to think you are acting unethically by censoring content in more restrictive countries and vice versa.
EDIT: I have no idea why a comment that amounts to "different countries have different laws" is being downvoted.
If you want to operate within a country you should follow the laws there. If the laws are immoral, you shouldn't operate there, or you should accept them and make money without being moral. That choice is up to the company. It's why google building AIs for china should be controversial.
This is reasonable as an ideal, but could be harmful in practice. A significant percentage of the U.S. population believes inarguably wrong and demonstrably dangerous things at this point. It is possible that the only effective way to fix that is corporate censorship. That wouldn’t make me happy, but I’m not going to agree with letting a crazy person steer the Titanic into an iceberg just because it’s their right to do so.
Ah, but how do you know you're not the one believing crazy wrong and dangerous things? All those terms are highly relative and if your answer is argument by authority, well ...
But none of those areas are the ones where people get worked up about misinformation. Unless you have been told there is a "consensus" about things like COVID, vaccines and climate change, where there most certainly isn't?
Not commenting on covid or vaccines, not my field, but climate change for one has pretty much been established to a great deal of accuracy (that climate change is man made)
Even someone like Senate leader Mitch McConnell isn’t denying it anymore. Research is still ongoing to what extend we are going to be impacted.
So, even if someone is denying climate change or reading misinformation, it doesn’t change that man made climate change is here, and what its causes are.
So yeah, there is scientific consensus in that area on the broad perimeters.
Now if you believe something different, that just goes against what we already established!
"Man is changing the climate" is a very weak statement if taken literally, and not really what people mean by the term climate change. Of course man has some sort of impact on the atmosphere, as we do on all aspects of our environment.
Once you get into questions like, by how much is it changing, are those changes a big deal or not that serious, by how much does it really affect the weather, even what the actual history of global temperature is, there is a lot of disagreement even amongst scientists, although of course given the tiny size and cliquey nature of many academic fields, criticism from outside the field must always be considered as well.
Those are pretty much already answered, and by many people. The Wikipedia link goes into that :) Data suggests we are currently looking at 2 degrees temperature change as a global average.
While everyone is free to come up with different answers, there isn’t anything credible at the moment.
A friend of mine programs climate models based on latest mathematical insights and data. For 10 years he would put his hand in a fire that it is happening and it will be bad.
Point by point :
How much is changing? 2 degrees hotter on average.
How does it affect weather? More outliers such as the recent heat wave in the NW of USA.
Is it a big deal? Yes, because it unbalances a lot of eco systems and our ability to cope with it.
History of global temperature? Has been measured for hundreds of years now and we can deduce temperatures before that.
There is a lot of disagreements between scientists? No there isn’t (97% banks on man made climate change)
Clique nature of academic fields? That’s an entirely different topic and doesn’t change the data.
I guess education and honest information would be too radical an approach.
Governments and leaders are concerned that people don't trust them, yet the truth is, they don't deserve to be trusted. When the system is designed to create a placated populace instead of critical thinkers, those in charge are routinely lying and blatantly misleading instead of informing, then it's no surprise people will believe in all kinds of fringe ideas.
Hiding and shunning information can be a temporary band aid, but the inevitable effect is that people will trust official sources even less.
>A significant percentage of the U.S. population believes inarguably wrong and demonstrably dangerous things at this point
Yes. Both sides can agree that they think the other believes in falsehods. Since one person has one vote, there is effectively nothing you can do about it.
If I host a document for a certified notadoctor telling you that you should treat your children's autism by feeding them bleach which will certainly constitute abusing all of them and perhaps killing some do you think online marketplaces of ideas should ignore the fact that half the population is dumber than dirt and the dead kids and keep serving up poison?
The case I gave is not in any way hypothetical there were many popular actual self published ebooks on amazon instructing you to abuse and possibly kill your kids with bleach to cure their autism.
I'm not going too far I'm speaking empirically. Almost 1/4 of the population has an IQ less than 90 and is empirically challenged and a substantial portion of the remainder including those with reasonable or even high IQ are completely dysfunctional because regardless of how functional a brain they were born with they have basically ruined it by training it only to consume and create trash.
One has only to talk to a large enough number of your fellow humans to realize half of them are in fact dumber than dirt. If there weren't literature about bleaching your childs insides to cure their autism or other insanity of the same grade would find no takers.
If you find the number of bleach swillers insufficient consider thatnearly 40% of us in America believe that a genie created the earth less than 10k years ago. Overwhelmingly this is because they do not possess the intellectual aptitude to dismiss this theory. If their brains were highly functioning they would do so despite conditioning. Plenty of people will live 70-100 years and pass away in their hospital bed without ever ever having turned their brain into the on position.
On the flip side others aggressively question the reality they are given but because they lack the inherent intelligence or have spent their entire intellectual life consuming the equivalent of junk food they are utterly incapable of discerning the difference between insane fantasy and truth.
The comment provokes a thought however, ugliness aside.
Most of us here are presuming (I presume) that we are immune from misinformation, disinformation etc. Why is that? What quality distinguishes we,the observers,from they,the victims?
It seems obvious that education might be the decider. But I'd like to know. What quality of the HN reader distinguishes him from the victim of misinformation?
There is plenty of room to have a nuanced conversation about different viewpoints while also taking down obvious lies and crazy. The choice is not between moderating everything and nothing.
We are all vulnerable to misinformation that affirms our existing biases or that comes from individuals/organizations that have either previously been reliable sources or we have incorrectly regarded as reliable.
If the Washington Post ran an article that stated that a former NASA scientist believed the rate of climate change was vastly higher than previously anticipated I would probably buy it.
If it later turned out his specialty was Chemistry, he had been fired for using his expertise to make meth, and his research was bunkum I would have to eat crow and watch that publication far more carefully.
On a more realistic note I believed to my chagrin that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and reading of some of the awful crimes of Saddam I thought not going in would be a great act of moral evil as it would mean abandoning the citizens to be victimized by a monster. 21 year old me didn't realize there was no good proof of WMDs, that we would kill half a million of them, and that we might well leave them no better off if our efforts collapsed shortly after we left.
Insofar as what separates the reasonable from the rubes
- A modest amount of accumulated understandings about how history,science, math, stats etc work sufficient to reject obviously untrue statements
- The understanding that everything you understand or think you know ought to be criticized and revised over time in response to new evidence. Valuing truth over authority and conformity.
- An understanding of the common failure modes of logic and reason so that you can recognize bullshit when you see it
- A reasonably strategy to use all of the above to evaluate sources continually to see if they are and remain trustworthy.
What we really all need is the right degree of epistemological humility. I think I’m better than average at discerning misinformation yes, but know that I have been wrong in the past so never weight my conclusions 100%. Its mostly people who live only in the political/social and never have to bang their heads against the hard truth of physics/nature who have complete certainty in the corectness of their positions.
Host absolutely everything? Instructions on creating explosives, chemical and biological weapons? Some future doomsday weapon? Would you say everything should be available up to and including methods for any unbalanced individual to single-handedly kill thousands or millions? How about your personal details, ID, address, employer, medical history, surfing, shopping habits? Would you even be ok with hackernews piercing the veil of your "throwaways885" username and publishing it?
Platforms are not publishers. The publisher of these things should face legal action (including the removal of their content). It's not for the platform to pick and choose.
Can you define "platform" in this context? Is this a legal term?
It's interesting to see this dichotomy between platforms and publishers in these types of threads. I assume it stems from a reading of Section 230 somehow, but the word "platform" never appears in that text.
This is what I think people often miss in those discussions. There is an assumption that everything shared/'hosted' online is someone's opinion and thus should be allowed to be shared.
This was never a case on the internet, don't trust what you read online. What should be regulated is what can be advertised, because most what you read is indistinguishable from an ad. Smoothies cure cancer - an ad or someone believe some antivax type bullshit? What if it's an ad to vote for a particular party because the other will do unbelievable bad things? Fanatic or serious opinion? Should you allow those kind of post on your platform?
In my opinion you should just because it is the only way to make sure that your platform is not taken seriously and will prompt people to read something a bit more serious. It will stir controversies on twitter but who in IRL seriously considers an opinion of a twitter person?
Edit: I went for a smoke I thought about it a bit more, take a look at voat vs reddit. Voat was created as a response to censorship on reddit and look at the cesspool of a place it is. Companies do not censor content because they have a moral stand or a political agenda, they moderate the content because otherwise it will turn into a shit you wouldn't believe (HN does it to). There is much more trolls on the internet responding to everything they can than legitimate people trying to have a discussion.
New Eternal September started with social media and those not hardened by the internet before have a hard time to just dismiss what they read as 'a troll'
> we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like
I'd argue that there is already a (fairly) tried and tested process in place to deal with this, it's the legal system.
There are plenty of media outlets that publish stuff I don't particularly like, but almost none of it is illegal, so - to be blunt - I just have to suck it up.
Some of my friends have opinions that I - at times - violently disagree with, but I file that under one of the side effects of life, and I deal with it.
I'm rarely "outraged" by companies hosting stuff. If it's illegal, knock yourself out and get it taken down.
However if it's just really, really annoying or you find it against your own worldview, perhaps take a deep breath / drink a cup of tea* / go to the gym / hug your OH, and move on to something more important?
There are two more ways to deal with content we don't like. We've largely abandoned these to our great harm:
1) Get to know people in your community who hold differing opinions. We all need to be doing this more - fostering friendship over the things we have in common. This isn't easy, but the Western world used to be far better at it.
2) Engage in healthy debate, which means advocating a specific opinion in a public way -- either speech, column in your local newspaper, etc. -- with carefully researched references/sources, no ad-hominem attacks, assuming good faith and intent on the part of those who disagree, and respect for the differing opinions of others.
Imagine if every local community did (1) and (2) -- people would be a lot happier and would be less likely to hold unsupportable opinions, since even cursory research (i.e. prior to publicly arguing in favor of them) would show those opinions have no basis in reality.
The idea that these megaphone institutions can and must act as arbiters of what's "ok" speech and what's not is socially untenable.
The best marker of sweeping political radicalism is when no one is allowed to be neutral anymore--not even news outlets or public forums. When everything is political and everyone is forced out of political neutrality, we're in big trouble as a society.
"If you're not for us, you're against us" is an ominous statement in any context, and when that becomes a mainstream political cry, it signals that freedom itself is coming to an end (not to mention freedom of speech).
You could never walk into a private bar and demand the right to hand out Nazi propaganda, solely on the merits that "well, that's where all the people are!!"
As for neutrality, there are plenty of actively neutral companies, in action, today. They're just not very popular. Because they're filled with horrible people who demand the right to say horrible things. And no one wants to hang out with those people.
Now that the market has decided horrible beings aren't entitled to anyone else's space, the horrible human beings are insisting that the big mean bullies be forced, through threat of violence, to tolerate them.
That doesn't seem to square with the progress civilization has made over the last several centuries. We no longer torture animals, treat humans as property, believe in the 'evil eye', etc.
I think rather than "violently" you meant to say "vehemently." If not then ignore this comment. If so then you should probably edit as the two have important differences in meaning.
The legal system isn't great for this as it tends to listen to the one with the most expensive lawyers, especially in the US. And companies like Google have a lot of expensive lawyers.
> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like.
Is this actually true? I only think certain fringe Twitter groups are mad that companies host controversial things.
There is a long history of people in the USA and elsewhere being mad that companies host certain things - pornography was illegal to distribute for decades because of such beliefs, and is still segregated from non-pornographic content, and shunned by all regular advertisers (you won't see Coca-Cola ads or Beats headphones on pornographic sites) for precisely this reason.
Complacence might be a better descriptor than mad/outraged. For example nobody really gets up in arms over companies choosing not to host (what they deem to be) pornography for example, and various bans of risqué content and the people who produce them from major platforms tend to get a lukewarm response from people who are otherwise vocal about free speech (see: the USA's FOSTA/SESTA)
> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like
If by "we" you mean US politicians and mass media, then sure. But I'm not sure that's true for the general populace in the US, nor for other countries.
On another note - I don't like that they host things, at all. That is, I don't like that the entity which runs a search engine is also the one which hosts a large part of the videos available for free on the Internet. Or that a company making popular computing hardware like Apple is also the host and gatekeeper for mobile apps, podcasts etc.
Isn't US Civil Rights movement notable for its nonviolence overall? MLK emphasized asserting basic human rights, so that the violence of the state should be seen more clearly by contrast.
The US revolutionary movement might be a more clear example where violent action was decisive.
In a free society sites like liveleaks and wikileaks absolutely have a right to exist. As well as all the fringe conspiracy sites.
The problem with censorship by Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Google is different. Here the government is putting pressure on the tech companies to censor content they don't like. Censor the bad people or risk antitrust action.
It's so gross and so clearly in violation of the first amendment. Even elected officials and professors are not exempted. It doesn't matter if you're elected by the people or if you're an expert in your field, if you say something that is considered 'misinformation' by the Ministry of Truth you get censored. It's outrageous, and if big tech doesn't change course we need to start building alternative platforms. But it might already be too late.
It doesn’t matter if competing platforms are built. Normal people don’t care one way or another, especially outside of how those other platforms are popularly characterized, so those other platforms will never take off. Only a minority of people are conscious of their liberties and subsequently any potential infringement to them.
As far as I can tell, no shift of the overton window begins with 'normal people', rather it always ends with 'normal people'. Any campaign of this nature is a long and sustained effort over months and years. One requiring that normal people precede them on the wave of change is a guarantee that one will never begin to move in the first place.
All of the major platforms of today will surely be replaced eventually. Snapchat and TikTok came seemingly out of nowhere in roughly the same FAANG environment as today.
This is the problem, isn't it? You seem to be posting an easy question to answer. But it's not, is it? Who is Google to judge what anyone would "consider violent or garbage?"
I don't remember electing them to control this aspect of life. And where does it stop? What is the line? Who is actually defining these things?
When a small group of people control the definition of "wrong think" then we're gonna have a problem regardless of which side of the argument those people are on.
While your question is innocent enough, I get the feeling you already knew the answer.
> This is the problem, isn't it? You seem to be posting an easy question to answer. But it's not, is it? Who is Google to judge what anyone would "consider violent or garbage?"
You aren't even touching on the complexities. The original article was about "misleading content". Google is asserting that they will take action on "content that deceives, misleads, or confuses users".
Speech is violence nowadays. Silence is also violence.
One of these days, I'm going to go live in the woods and no internet. People clearly do not want a free society anymore so I may as well just check out.
Or just migrate to a country that aligns more with your views, like many immigrants have done and do today. John Locke never said anything about needing form new ones.
The, "Won't somebody please think of my children" excuse is a little selfish considering there are people with differing opinions (who may or may not have children too).
would be great if fbk and twitter did the same thing!
any group like 'occupy democrats' 'vets against trump' - would be gone.
If they would do these to the search results, most of the news sites would not longer have top positions! I'm liking this now.
"content that deceives, misleads, or confuses users"
- funny that I used to ask people on fbook some years ago when they posted some things, 'do you believe the thing you are re-posting is true or fake? Is it funny or serious? Do you think your 'followers' think it's true when they see you post it?
Trying to determine the understanding of the re-poster - but also the 'intent' of them re-sharing - sadly I think most of the time it was to 'deceive' aka virtue signal tribe thing - even when they admitted things may not be true, they still wanted the thing posted and shared - and knowing others may not look at it and not know it's not true.
need to think on this longer. Wait, when g/f/t thought the hunter laptop was fake they affected our national elections and discourse, when they did not care if golden shower oppo research was true or fake it affected real world stuff.
Not so sure these folks can be trusted with deciding what should be shared as true/false actually. The reach and effects of these decisions are large and serious.
>Who is Google to judge what anyone would "consider violent or garbage?"
They own and operate a service called Google Drive. They offer that service under whatever terms they decide. And the decisions they make are relevant to their own service. They likely also don't allow you to use their service to distribute illegal material.
>I don't remember electing them to control this aspect of life. And where does it stop? What is the line? Who is actually defining these things?
Google has the right to make this decision on their own platform. They don't have the right to make this decision outside of their platform, and are not attempting to do so. They're not a government. They cannot control what other sites do. They don't have an army. They're not burning textbooks or jailing teachers. They're not controlling the definition of "wrong think."
If you don't like what they're doing, you're welcome not to use their service. Google Drive isn't the only cloud-based document backup service by a long shot.
> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like.
Yet it is rational to oppose distribution of what you think is wrong and promote distribution of what you think is right. You must have a hidden premise in there somewhere.
Is it rational, though? Maybe for a certain type of politically active person. But I believe in free expression (the principle kind, in addition to the 1st amendment kind), so it seems to me it is not rational for me to oppose the distribution of anything legal. Or is it irrational of me to have principles, rather than being maximally self-interested or social-utopia-utilitarian?
The thing is you are "promoting distribution of what you think is right" literally right now. Like, with this very comment right here, you are being politically active!
So, assuming you are acting rationally, you are right now promoting what you think is "right" ("anything legal", "1st amendment" eg the United States's Constitution), while countering what you think is "wrong".
If you didn't believe in the promotion of what you think is right, then you wouldn't be posting to argue against what you think is wrong! You would never upvote (bias) or downvote (censorship) and so on. Sure, you could argue that your style of promotion (comments on HN), or that promoting your worldview in general is better for certain outcomes, but ultimately your still just arguing for "freedom" in your particular definition of "freedom" (still promoting or opposing distribution of right/wrong)
I think you are equivocating. I don’t oppose the distribution of any other opinion. I don’t like those opinions, but I’m not trying to make it harder for anyone to say them. And trying to change someone’s mind about it is not at all the same as “opposing distribution” regardless of whether it has the same intent or potential effect.
I'm not trying to equivocate here (or be combative, I hope this is an interesting discussion for both of us!). I'm being serious: I consider downvoting to be "opposing distribution" of a statement by definition, since it limits the distribution, although perhaps not very effective if done by yourself.
> regardless of whether it has the same intent or potential effect.
I disagree, and I think I'm in the majority to have more outcomes-based ethics [1]
What I'm trying to get across is that you are "politically active", whether you think you are or not. "Activism" can literally involve just a bunch of friends on an online platform upvoting and downvoting. Even just a small group of people doing this can even be effective censorship in certain contexts, such as local elections. Sure, Google may have more cost-effective means of censorship --- larger political campaigns have to pay firms LOADS to bury stories or control online discourse without access to the power Google has --- but it's still the same result, just a matter of who calls the shots and cost-efficacy.
You might argue that controlling discourse like this is not censorship or unethical based on your definition, but as you said it can have the same intent and has the same potential effect, so to another perspective, perhaps one that places less value on the USA constitution, it most certainly is.
How would my being mildly politically active on HN contradict my belief that it is rational for me to encourage the distribution of legal speech, without regard for agreement with the content? I feel like you’re trying to chide me by reminding me that I’m engaging in politics. Yes, I’m engaging in politics. I just don’t see what that has to do with the thrust of my objection.
Your point about downvotes being censorship is troubling and gives me pause. I think it’s only censorship because of how HN fades the comment towards illegibility. But I have always thought that is a user-hostile design choice. I’d much rather you could see the score, but still be able to read them easily. I have spent enormous amounts of time carefully reading people I disagree with.
(FWIW, I did not downvote you, and I do so rarely.)
> I’d much rather you could see the score, but still be able to read them easily.
I agree. Actually I'd almost forgotten they did that since I use the StyleBot extension and have ".commtext { color: black; }" in the CSS for this site, which overrides the fading. I also enabled the setting to show "dead" comments; they aren't always worth reading, but it happens more often than you might think.
Actually that's another aspect in its own right—HN doesn't just fade downvoted comments but removes them altogether if they're downvoted enough. And sometimes comments are actually deleted by the administrators and not just marked as "dead" and hidden from the page by default. It's their site, and I would uphold their right to not be forced to host comments they object to against their will, but there is some actual censorship going on and not just convenient "curation" of what shows up clearly in the default view.
I don't see downvotes as censorship when the downvoted comment is still available for those who care to read it, and not actually deleted. To me it's more of an indication that, in the reader's opinion, the comment was perceived as not contributing to the discussion. In general I prefer to upvote the good comments and save the downvotes for trolling, flamebait, etc. which would be likely to derail the thread. To put it in words, an upvote is like saying "check this out" while a downvote is either "don't waste your time" or "this thread belongs somewhere else". But you can still see the downvoted comments if you want.
> How would my being mildly politically active on HN contradict my belief that it is rational for me to encourage the distribution of legal speech, without regard for agreement with the content? [...] I just don’t see what that has to do with the thrust of my objection.
Yeah I'm not really making my point clear here, sorry.
My point is that a "values-neutral" platform doesn't exist, and every attempt to build such a thing is usually only "values-neutral" from the perspective of it's creator. For example, I'd argue there's a contradiction even in the way you phrased it here: "Legal speech" implies you are indeed giving "regard for agreement with the content", since this would imply suppressing content that is not in agreement with some legal framework you have in mind.
> I think it’s only censorship because of how HN fades the comment towards illegibility.
It's not just that. Upvotes promotes one position over the other, so when one considers statistical properties of how far people scroll down, or how likely people are to expand low-voted comments or go to another page (for platforms like Reddit, HN, etc), the effect can be the same.
It's interesting to see that as online platforms gradually replace "traditional" journalism for how people get information, we're rehashing a some of the same old arguments about what is "objective" journalism. Publishing ANYTHING, whether physical documents (eg newspapers) or HTML documents (eg HN, Facebook), will always promote some worldview and censor another based on what is included in the publication, and the ordering of the topics.
Sometimes this censorship is explicit (eg nixing a story, Google taking down a search result), other times it's done statistically (eg putting stuff "below the fold", a search result being on page 10), but our informational world is perpetually being shaped like this. Pretending that's it's even logically possible have unbiased platforms "without regard for agreement with the content" --- as an example, not you, but elsewhere here it was claimed 2010-2016 was mostly censorship-free --- is starting off on a wrong premise. If we start on a wrong premise, any further discussion is meaningless at best, and actively manipulative at worse (Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" slogan comes to mind)
> (FWIW, I did not downvote you, and I do so rarely.)
It's rational only if you don't think those powers will ever be turned against you. Once you realize what you're creating is a mechanism to censor rather than a particular instance of censorship, self interest should force you to realize that the censorship mechanism that you're supporting can be turned against you.
That is rational, yes. I think pretty much everyone thinks this way, with differing definitions of both "promote" and "oppose", and "wrong" and "right".
Though I may be misunderstanding what you are getting to here.
I think most religion is wrong, yet I'm not opposing that. I also think genocide is wrong, and yes, I'll oppose that. Same with anti-vax rhetoric.
While religion can be a real negative, it isn't generally the goal and often, there are good intentions. Genocide hurts people, though, through its nature. Anti-vaccine propaganda hurts folks as well. You simply cannot have these movements without hurting folks.
i-robot protect us all with truth! (except hunter laptop, and lab leak theory - hide those haha)
Actually - I am kind of okay with this new kindergarten gloves way of treating the people - let's give them the sharing a ability they deserve. California knows best what's good for everyone - just don't talk bad about beef. Well you may have to censor that in some other parts of the world.
Different kindergarten for different countries? different states?
Think how much better and safer this internet world is going to be without all these bad things!
I think another error is assuming that having all content within a few hyper-scale hyper-global ad-supported commercial repositories of everything is a natural or healthy state of affairs. Many small websites dedicated to particular things is IMO generally better both from a free speech and a moderation standpoint than these giants that have to thread an impossible needle. In other words, web 1.0 was better.
They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook.
I dont want to derail the discussion into another political debate but my thesis, is that some ideology spread like plague in Silicon Valley. The Good vs Evil. As the OP said Google stated off being good, but somewhere along the line the definition of Good got twisted a little bit. They keep thinking they were so righteous they literally started a crusade or witch-hunt ( so to speak ).
And it is in some way interesting because it rhymes with many historical events.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
> They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook.
Steve "we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone" Jobs liked making devices for everyone but definitely not for everything they might want to do on them.
What makes you think the government is that Messiah? Is it likely, in your view, that the government will go out of their way to "encourage the spread of misinformation"? I'm not seeing that happening.
In the EU, governments and actually trying very hard to discourage the spread of misinformation, as well as passing legislation that the tech sector has always claimed was not needed. So yes, it's very likely, as it's already happening.
I mean, I don’t really think this holds up. I have personally dropped all Google products I use in favor of privacy-focused alternatives. For example, GA>Fathom, Gmail>Protonmail, etc. So I’m sure privacy-focused competitors will pop up soon, or perhaps they already exist and I simply don’t know of them because I’m not a big user of the OP’s listed Goog products.
The market has most certainly spoken: we prefer privacy, and we no longer want to be a product. Competition will come to fill those needs. No need for more government regulation. The free market works.
This laughable arrogance. The market has most certainly spoken but not in the way you and your microcosm think it has. The market doesn't give a fuck about privacy. They want convenience and want to pay as little as they for it. Privacy might seem to be on people's tongues at this moment and it will continue to be still, but only a core few will actually make decisions that inconvenience them in order to achieve it. Only a few million people are leaving services like WhatApp en-masse. 99% of their customers do not give a fuck. They aren't doing drug deals (well some are), they aren't dissidents, they aren't terrorists, they're just every day people going about their business with likely zero real repercussions other than finding it a bit creepy and continuing to scroll. There's probably more people leaving because things have gotten a bit boring and uncool than people taking a principled stand for privacy.
We are, at least currently, outliers. Do not forget that.
I’m referring to the segment of the market I’m in. I didn’t mean ‘the market’ as in 100% market share. I should have said “the market is speaking.” No need to come off as rude.
That, and Google has ~ 20 years of history where they were perfectly fine and they've really only started to act up recently in ways that are, at worst, objectionable and inconvenient without being particularly harmful.
The risks of letting market competition sort it out are much smaller than the risks of making it a political football. As a political topic it is basically going to be two parties fighting over which set of lies get to be true. That won't be better.
I'm really sorry for the off-topic, but I've been waiting for a chance to ask because I see it here very, very often. What are people intending to denote with the "private" in "private company", especially where the company is so obviously and well-known to be public[ally traded]? What are you trying to distinguish it from by calling it private? Are you just pointing out it's not the government or quasi-governmental? Are you emphasizing that it has its own prerogatives?
Sorry, this has just been becoming a peeve for me on this site. I just want to know what you're trying to express by calling a company that is not privately owned, "private". Thanks.
The term "private company" has no relation to whether or not it is traded publicly. It simply means the company is not owned by or controlled by (in some sense) the government, but by "private" individuals
I guessed. I still don't understand why it is necessary to differentiate a category with 1.7 million members from a category with 17 members. Nobody here is ever, ever, ever (almost) discussing government corporations. I don't understand why people don't just say the 1st amendment doesn't apply to corporations. Everyone would know what they mean. Adding "private" suggests they are distinguishing it from something else. And maybe they are, but it always sounds like they're either misspeaking, confused, or repeating a meme.
Aren't most universities public companies even in USA? I know some of them are private, but there must be way more than 17 public ones. Add all the public schools, police departments etc, and you get quite a lot of them.
The key is in your last paragraph: the companies in question are privately owned in the sense of "private property". In the context of (American) public policy, due to factors such as the First Amendment, the distinction of a company being governmental/public vs non-governmental/private is much more likely to be relevant than it being publicly/privately traded.
My point is 0.0000006% of companies are governmental. In the context of the discussion, nobody is even thinking of those. So, “private” as a qualifier is hot air. It sounds ignorant to me.
Ignorant of what? Publicly (as in government) owned base infrastructure companies (like telecoms, to which Google et. al. are pretty similar in these ethics cases) are not rare in the world at all.
I feel the exact same way. I suspect "Private Company" is being used in relation to Public/Private Sector and not in relation to whether or not the company is publicly traded.
I feel like your sense of it might be right. But even then, you can count the number of public sector "companies" (like Fannie and Freddie) on one hand, so it just strikes me as such a bizarre distinction.
It's not a bizarre distinction. The discussion is about free speech, and a common talking point has to do with comparing the actions of companies to the protections laid out for free speech in the American first amendment.
However, the first amendment is a restriction on government, not a restriction on private individuals or corporations.
Private equity groups are private. My uncle’s construction company is private. Google isn’t private in any sense that isn’t confusing. Why not just say that the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to corporations? That seems clear to me.
And as an aside, how many of us really need to be reminded, several times per day, of the scope of the 1st amendment? Really? Isn’t it more likely it’s a tired debate stopper?
>"And as an aside, how many of us really need to be reminded, several times per day, of the scope of the 1st amendment? Really? Isn’t it more likely it’s a tired debate stopper? "
My feelings exactly. It doesn't accomplish anything and literally adds nothing to the debate. Does the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines imposed and cruel and unusual punishment only apply to the government too? Clearly, we can talk about the spirit of the Bill of Rights and apply that to things that aren't literally the government.
> It doesn't accomplish anything and literally adds nothing to the debate.
It's important because to many people (myself included) the spirit of the freedom of speech referred to in the 1st Amendment is that force (i.e. the exercise of government power) is not an appropriate or legitimate response to speech. Censorship in the broad sense involving hosting decisions by these organizations owned and run by private individuals is not a violation of the freedom of speech, because it does not involve the use of force.
> Does the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on excessive fines imposed and cruel and unusual punishment only apply to the government too?
Essentially, yes. The general principle applies to any organization which would take it upon itself to impose fines or punishment… which basically means the government, because the government doesn't let anyone else do that in its territory. For any organization other than the government this rule would go without saying, but since the government claims to be able to impose fines and punishment according to its own rules, unfettered by the rules of proportional response and natural law, this limitation must be made explicit.
>And as an aside, how many of us really need to be reminded, several times per day, of the scope of the 1st amendment? Really?
Yes, that's why people are pre-emptively raising the status of the corporations in question as private - to head off the discussion you're tired of hearing.
Despite that, instead of discussing what the proper ambit of content review should exist, 80% of the thread is still debating whether or not editorial control should exist in the first place; the exact same type of boring, rehashed discussion that adds nothing of value.
Now we're here having a meta discussion about the discussion that ALSO adds nothing of value, so it looks like no matter where we go there's no shortage of ink that leads nowhere :(.
The reason a distinction is drawn is because government has more rules it must follow when interacting with the public than google. Non-governmental entities in the united states are less regulated than the government.
I would much rather live with censorship that can be removed by withholding dollars vs one that requires votes.
Just look at the puritanical rules concerning language and sexuality forced on broadcasters. Those rules are decades old and outdated and will likely remain forever.
When companies fuck up on censorship, the results seem to last only a few years. When governments fuck up, the consequences echo for multiple lifetimes.
Private my ass. I understand the terminology, but they are part of the defacto public domain, and are a publicly owned company. They built their company utilizing the resources and technological prowess of the United States, then piss in its face to cater to woke leftist silicon valley politics (which doesn't represent 90%+ of America).
If that MIT study about the end of the world turns out to be true, THIS type of woke bullshit will be the cause. And when society falls, I have a feeling who's gonna be gunned after first.
What do you suggest? the government takes over Google? Prevents them from controlling what they store on their servers?
If society fails (which is little more than a prepper wet dream) everyone's going to go gunning for whoever has food and fuel. No one will care about Google or political parties.
I'd suggest we protect freedom of speech similar to how we protect civil rights.
Before civil rights, "private businesses" used the same exact excuse as big tech while refusing customers based on race.
In the current setup, big tech thrives risk-free via governmental protections separating them from their customers (or what their customers post on the platform). The underlying concept of social media has become a public utility, and should be protected as such. Once big tech began altering visibility of posts based on politics (in any way/shape/form), they crossed the Rubicon.
I agree with everything except "I think your fundamental error is in the fact that you think" - I don't think this, and I don't think my post implied that I think that either.
To clarify my statement: "We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information." - I don't think that the structure provided by a company is sufficient to do this properly. Rather than companies/governments, we need protocols and standards. For instance, what if we had a decentralized app (dapp) built on something like cardano, that allowed one to edit docs that lived on an IPFS? We might have to sacrifice some micro-conveniences (e.g. google docs saves automatically for you as often as every few keystrokes) to make it tenable on something like a blockchain, but it seems feasible.
Honestly a lot of folks should assess the value that big tech provides. We survived the 90’s running MSDOS backing stuff up to disks. And storage is cheap. Cloud this-and-that is great in theory but in practice it makes things too complicated. For instance, whenever I use a cloud-centric application I’m thinking okay… so where’s my files? And the answer is who knows!
More specifically I used to use OneNote when it used the local file system and I could get to my data. Then MSFT puts everything behind a cryptic ten-layer hashed URI…
The tech industry is like an insurance company now selling people on fear of losing files or productivity—but I’d wager more often than not technology gets in the way of folks productivity. By technology I mean fluffy clouds because obviously tech CAN help.
We need a better balance and a lot of that starts by keeping it simple.
> What happened to having specialized agencies regulate and inspect industries?
A lot of censorship has traditionally been governments threatening to regulate industries if they don't self regulate, and that's pretty much what's been going on.
we could get a lot closer if markets were well-regulated for fairness and competitiveness. instead, we get all sorts of distortions, some well-meaning but most not. one sign of a good market dynamic is a lot of medium-sized companies, rather than very large or very small, because that means the companies have taken advantage of economies of scale but no one firm has outsized advantage, so all must still compete.
to that end, google, facebook, et al. should each probably be split up into dozens of companies to start, with stong privacy, portability and interoperability standards/mandates at minimum.
Heard? By whom? Monopoly-capitalism directly benefits rulers, complaining to the very people who have incentives to keep the system as it is will not change anything. You and your fellow citizens have to actually do something.
Government regulation is no substitute for competition. The ability for consumers to walk away to a suitable alternative maintains a continual accountability that a single agency is unlikely to deliver.
This actually highlights the point well I think. The cost of walking away from Facebook is too high for most people even though they know its' bad for them.
Take myself for example. I only ever get angry when I browse my facebook feed and for some reason I've actually taken steps to ensure I get angry when I browse my own feed (chalk it up to silicon magic). I would like to leave facebook, but if I do I'd lose messenger which is the easiest and most consistent way for me to keep in contact with dozens of people (who mostly don't make me angry).
If facebook protocols were open source, then by now I would likely have dozens of different options to take my friend's list to a messenger only app that does not include a feed for me to angrily browse.
Lowering the cost to leave is a benefit to everyone since it reduces the reach of that anger inducing feed.
Isn't the Messenger app a "messenger only app that does not include a feed for me to angrily browse."? They also seem to have standalone web and desktop versions at messenger.com
We still need there to be suitable alternatives, so there needs to be some regulation at least, to encourage competition and/or to prevent companies from reaching a point where there are no longer alternatives.
There is a category of companies that doesn't try to be a content arbiter. Common carriers, utilities, other services that have an obligation to contract.
Of course the "contract" with SNPs is that you "pay" with your eyeballs falling on adverts, and the ads in turn don't want to be anything like common carriers. So turning any web service into something like a common carrier would have interesting knock-on effects.
I think your fundamental error is the fact that you think that a regulatory agency can fix these issues. It seems that many people on HN are just waiting for the new Savior government body, that will magically do something ethical and correct for all of the citizens, and not just some politicians like every other government body in history.
Did it occur to you that maybe the GP wasn’t suggesting a company solve the problem and was hinting at open source + open protocol?
1. The GP said nothing about any savior company. They said "We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority".
2. You seem to be saying here that you want a specialized agency to do censorship right, as one centralized decision maker. Am I misunderstanding? A Ministry of Truth?
I'd say that this decision by Google stems from regulators and public opnion bashing against misinformation.
Private companies follow the wind of the policies that are there to coerce them. In this case, the policy that is being put in place is that misinformation is dangerous and should be countered.
In 5 years, misinformation could be relegated to Tor networks, where it belongs.
> It's like hoping for market competition create health regulation in the food industry.
Why is it like that and not like gas stations not allowing smoking so their property doesn't go up in flames? It's really strange to think market forces must always be against consumer, there can be mutual benefit if the right incentives are put in place.
There are absolutely lots of regulations around fire near gas stations, why did you think that gas station owners made those rules? They have to follow them or they will lose their permit and get shut down.
The fundamental issue is companies dealing with out data when they should just be making hardware or software.
In the old days, computer companies made the hardware and government institutions used that to run the internet. This is how it should be. Companies should not be touching our data directly. They simply cannot handle the responsibility.
I would much rather have a even just a handful of private companies be the regulators rather than a single entity.
If our founding fathers had one guiding principle, it was to distribute power as much as possible as power has a strong tendency to concentrate and corrupt.
I often wonder whether the solution is setting the expectation with companies that if they act in bad faith, their leadership will be om nom nommed? Apologies for the metaphor, it's the best I could come up with on short notice.
As people remind us all the time, it’s not a violation of the right to freedom of expression if a private company stops letting you use their services. It is a violation of that right if the government does so.
competition definitely can make things better. But we aren’t seeing enough competition and these companies are engaging in anti-competetive behavior without much consequences.
executive agencies should inspect and enforce, but not regulate. That is the legislature's job and they cannot felegate it beyond "implementation details". We have been too lenient with this so we get the FCC, FDA, EPA, ATF etc flipflpping on what amount to laws instead of details with every change of administration. That isn't how its supposed to work. Congress decides laws, no one else.
Well by all means regulate, but realistically, for example, if we had a Google Drive run by the 'other side' of the political aisle (kind of like Gab v Twitter), then if Google banned certain content, it's unlikely the other would, and vice versa.
Unfortunately, the issue here is companies responding to something other than the market.
The issue is that we know from experience, after 20+ years of the modern Internet, that if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race. Then, let's say you personally were in charge of said Free Speech Drive- every day you'd get up and hear about people using it for (legal) jailbait photos, Islamic State recruiting, collaboration between extremist militia groups in various countries (including your own), actual illegal content, and so on. Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that?
For one thing, it's easy to say 'well we'd only take down illegal content'. But in practice there isn't such a bright line, there's lots of borderline stuff, authorities could rule something posted on your site illegal after the fact- lots of these situations are up to a prosecutor's judgement call. Would you risk jail to push the boundaries? Coordinating 1/6 wasn't necessarily illegal until- it was.
If Islamic State is recruiting on Free Speech Drive, posting manifestos, encouraging Western residents to actual jihad- you wouldn't take that down? You'd leave it up if it hewed up to the line of being legal- really? Jailbait or non-nude pics of someone's teenage daughter, hosted in the thousands- you wouldn't take that down? It's easy to be an absolutist in an Internet argument, it's much harder when you face the sort of everyday content moderation issues you see in the real world
Another wrinkle in all of this is that you can use free speech as a form of censorship.
For example, if someone says something you don't like, you can intimidate them into shutting up by, say, threatening to reveal their personal information, such as their legal identity, address of residence, and so on. On certain corners of the Internet, merely dropping dox is good enough to get randos (who won't even be affiliated with you, so +1 to plausible deniability) to harass someone you want to shut up.
A more technical variant of this is DDoS attacks. Instead of trying to intimidate someone into shutting up with threats of stochastic terrorism; you shout over them by sending a bunch of traffic to their site until the server crashes or they run out of money.
So even if you're a hardcore free speech extremist, you still need to embrace some level of "censoring the censors" if you want the Internet to actually be usable.
Agreed. That's not even getting into just pure spam, which from people like Alex Stamos I've heard is 100-1000x the issue that culture war content moderation is. Once you've accepted that a platform can remove the kind of spam that killed MySpace- or doxing or a DDoS attack, as you say- you're already on the (common sense IMO) road to content moderation. Which again, from 25+ years of the modern Internet, we know is just mandatory to have a useable site
That's not censorship though. Threats are what people are forced to do when they cannot censor you, as censorship is much more direct. And DDoS attacks aren't speech.
You've seemingly distinguished DDoS attacks from legitimate traffic. If someone is "flooding the zone" with disinformation with the purpose of making it impossible to discern the truth (i.e. it's not legitimate, good faith discourse), is it not reasonable to draw a parallel with DDoSing?
DDoS traffic doesn't contain any form of "speech" and cannot lead to any. If you insist on drawing dodgy analogies, the correct parallel would be someone taking a truck to a political rally and then playing incredibly loud white noise at volumes that prevent people hearing each other.
As for the idea that people are deliberately flooding the zone with disinformation, I'm afraid I've only seen that coming from the sort of people who use it as an excuse to engage in censorship. There is certainly a massive disinformation problem, but it's not the one they mean when they say that. Consider the experience of this guy, who just "woke up" to the fact that the BBC has been manipulating him:
I myself watched a deceptive BBC news report last year in which they presented a social worker as a "dental specialist", a man whose brother died of COVID except the report admitted the cause of death was unconfirmed, and supposedly flooded ECMO unit that turned out to have spare beds available.
> threatening to reveal their personal information, such as their legal identity
What's the problem with that? Bad things on the internet happen more often than not because of the lack of responsibility.
Doxxing has become the primary sin in the Internet religion but it would solve all kind of problems. I am going to commit that sin and say that Doxxing is the solution, you can downvote me and make my comment greyed out and censor me when you argue against censorship.
Instead of deleting content, simply make sure that it's linked to someone who can pay for it if it turn out to be something to be payed for.
The Anonymity argument is only good when you are actively persecuted by a state actor. I don't agree that you deserve anonymity because the public will demonise you. If you hold strong believes that can be met harshly by the general public, you better be ready for the pushback and think of ways to make it accepted. That's how it has been done since ever.
Therefore, when a content is questionable maybe the users should be simply KYC'ed en left alone until a legal take down order is issued. If its illegal(like illegal porn, copyrighted content, terroristic activities etc), go to prison for it. If its BS get your reputation tarnished.
Who the hell gets to judge what is 'to be payed for' in this world you're talking about? The mob? No thanks!
In fact the internet actually went to shit the minute it pivoted from 'Dont share your personal info publicly' to 'please give us every last drop of your personal information and share it publicly'
>Who the hell gets to judge what is 'to be payed for' in this world you're talking about
Those who demand the payment, obviously.
Denying the existence of the god or being gay could be something to be payed for in some places and obviously that is horrible thing but anonymity doesn't solve that.
Fighting for a change or leaving that place solves something. Alan Turing himself was subjected to these things in the United Kingdom. A few decades later things changed in the UK and had nothing to do with the anonymity.
Now those who think that gays deserve equal rights demand payment. Again, anonymity it's not helping the anti-gay folks but simply creates low quality discussion and stress and nothing more.
Stopped people getting doxxed, hunted down a lynched in countries where you're executed for being a homosexual, while still being able to communicate safely online with other people in the same situation?
How exactly does anonymity not solve that problem?
> If you hold strong believes that can be met harshly by the general public, you better be ready for the pushback and think of ways to make it accepted. That's how it has been done since ever.
The problem is that we're not talking about the general public. Let's say I'm Jewish. Someone on the internet may "doxx" me by finding a group of neonazis and spreading my information there, resulting in me getting threats and hate.
The internet seems to specialize in this sort of "doxxing". Why? My theory is that the internet, even if you have a real name for a handle, still distances and dehumanizes others to the point where it's hard to understand the pain you're causing.
It's hard to walk up and slap someone because you feel the slap and see them wince in pain. It's easy to DM someone on twitter something far more hurtful than a slap, laugh about it with your tribe of neonazis, and forget about it the next day.
> The internet seems to specialize in this sort of "doxxing". Why? My theory is that the internet, even if you have a real name for a handle, still distances and dehumanizes others to the point where it's hard to understand the pain you're causing.
That's a good theory. My personal theory is there are a lot of psychopaths and sociopaths in the world, and the internet lets them find each other and form communities that revel in causing misery.
I think the solution of your problem is physically securing you against neo nazis instead of hiding your identity. Unless of corse you are writing this from the 1940's and you are in Central Europe. If that's the case, you have a case.
I am writing this on the internet. Physically securing myself does nothing to prevent hatemail, DoSs, and slander.
The ideal that "lies can't hurt you, the truth is stronger than lies" has never seemed to actually work. There are countless fictions are far more prominent than facts, and there are countless people who's online experience has been damaged by a small contingent of dedicated attackers.
The response to "harboring free speech to the extreme results in neonazis digitally harassing Jews" should not be "okay, fine, lock your door at night, free speech is more important than you being harassed".
>If people believe that it’s wrong for you to be subjected to that, those who do this to you will pay for it.
Are you referring to vigilante justice or just trusting the system? (What Americans refer to as the "democratic process" and the "justice system")
Because if it's the former, it takes a lot for people to raise a hand against others outside self-defense.
If it's the latter...the system usually fails. And saying "yeah well eventually, once there's enough political pressure, it won't fail" isn't any consolation to those who are now having to spend thousands of dollars on a therapist to recover from the trauma they've suffered (because American health insurance typically has crap mental health coverage).
>People are much nicer when their reputation is at stake.
I think a more accurate statement would be "People are much nicer when their money is at stake." And I don't mean "nicer" as in "genuinely better," it's more "I'll paint on a smile and not say anything bad" (just ask a waiter and they'll have plenty of tales where they had to do this for a tip).
Today, there are plenty of online hangouts for people with all sorts of ideas. This is great since people can easily form communities around a TV show, hobby, etc, but it also enables flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, whose views are often rooted in bigotry (see: All Gas No Brakes video on the flat earth convention [0]). Those communities tend to encourage an "us vs them" mentality and to cut out those who seek to "hold them back" (basically modern cults - alienate yourself from your friends and loved ones, we will provide all the community you need).
In the past, joining groups like the Klan was a much more difficult endeavor (they tended to operate much more in the shadows), and the groups tended to be on the smaller side. Today, it's just a matter of joining a Facebook group about "race realism", "the truth about George Floyd", or whatever, and bam, you have access to thousands of like-minded individuals to build your own personal echo chamber. The traditional tactics of people avoiding those they dislike IRL don't work so well as a form of collective shaming when you've got someone who is terminally online and has tons of people to tell them just how right they are and linking various garbage to reinforce the worldview.
See, I deeply dislike my speech moderated. Here on HN I am not allowed to advocate certain opinions like "US was wrong on even attempting to ban TikTok", I already got in trouble two times for it and I hope this wont be the 3rd one(I am supposed to pick my words carefully so not to inflict strong feelings, or my account gets rate limited or comments hidden). Also, whenever I express an unpopular opinion or controversial proposition(like the one in this thread) I would get my writings grayed out or collapsed instead of rebutted. That is a censorship by a community. When it comes to the online communities, they are often heavily moderated to push certain agendas which creates bubbles.
Free speech is non existent these days. The places that had were invaded by trolls and dabd actors, go shut down one by one after each incident that cost outrage.
My proposition attempts to solve these issues. Don't censor, never delete or ban anything or anyone unless legally required to do so(copyrighted content or illegal porn), hold responsible instead.
I recognise that there's value of anonymity, what I propose is to limit it to the occasions when there's a value.
Oh BTW, if when I say non-anonymous I don't necessarily mean a connection to the government issued legal identity. Using a pseudonym that is the same everywhere but not connected to a government recognised identity should be good enough most of the times. Throwaway accounts are fine when relevant. One person pushing an agenda through multiple accounts is not fine. There can be mechanisms to allow anonymous posting attached to a real identity where doxxing is an option when the person is determined to be a bad actor.
> That if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race.
That's only due to selection effects. If being open were the default then they'd be diluted among all the other people. ISPs themselves, (older) reddit, 4chan all serve as examples that the people you don't want to talk to can be mostly siloed off to some corner and you can have your own corner where you can have fun. Things only get problematic once you add amplification mechanisms like twitter and facebook feeds or reddit's frontpage.
> For one thing, it's easy to say 'well we'd only take down illegal content'. But in practice there isn't such a bright line, there's lots of borderline stuff, authorities could rule something posted on your site illegal after the fact- lots of these situations are up to a prosecutor's judgement call. Would you risk jail to push the boundaries?
I don't see how that's an issue? They send a court order, you take down the content is a perfectly reasonable default procedure. For some categories of content there already exist specific laws which require takedown on notification without a court order, which exactly depends on jurisdiction of course, in most places that would be at least copyright takedowns and child porn.
> Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that?
That's pretty much what telcos have to deal with for example. Supposedly 4chan also gets requests from the FBI every now and then. It may be a nuisance, but not some insurmountable obstacle. For big players this shouldn't be an issue and smaller ones will fly under the radar most of the time anyway.
Also, having stricter policies doesn't make those problems go away. People will still post illegal content, but now in addition to dealing with the FBI you also need to deal with moderation policies, psychiatrists for your traumatized moderators (which you're making see that content) and endusers complaining about your policy covering X but not Y or your policy being inconsistently enforced or whatever.
>ISPs themselves, (older) reddit, 4chan all serve as examples that the people you don't want to talk to can be mostly siloed off to some corner and you can have your own corner where you can have fun. Things only get problematic once you add amplification mechanisms like twitter and facebook feeds or reddit's frontpage.
This isn't true at all, and the reddit report following their ban wave is pretty clear about it; once areas that actively established a standard of violent or racist discourse as acceptable were banned, the volume of objectionable material across the site dropped.
4ch had a similar situation, where the culture on /b/, which was intentionally left as an explicitly unmoderated segment of the site, a silo, actively invaded other boards with violent, racist content.
It isn't that people sit in silos and do nothing otherwise - it's that the silos themselves cause people to believe their content is acceptable, then spread that shit everywhere.
I wrote "mostly siloed" not "perfectly siloed". This is no different from real life where your social sphere is not perfectly insulated from other social spheres. Perfectly siloed also means filter bubbles.
I think this is a really good point, and I think that if anyone is really committed to promoting free-speech-maximalist approach to the web they should be focused on building tools that make is easier for people to host and distribute their own content without relying on a centralized service.
Any business with the technical ability to censor what they host is going to be tempted (and likely pressured by other actors) to take down content that people find objectionable. Removing these "chokepoints" where a small number of people have the ability to engage in mass censorship is key if you want to promote more diverse speech on the web. (Not everyone has this goal!)
a lot of people who say they want an absolute free speech drive/free speech host have never actually worked for a colocation/dedicated server/hosting ISP and seen how the sausage is made.
It's a real problem. It's easier to suppress such content, but the problem is, it just goes elsewhere where it is almost completely unchecked, and it just proliferates in much darker circles as a result, and we have even less exposure as to its true volume.
Maybe there should be more of an effort to reduce peoples' incentive to engage in that sort of behavior in the first place. Why do people join violent extremist groups? Why do people engage with CP? Why do terrorist groups exist? Is it just human nature? Is it a fact that with 7+ billion people we are destined to have millions of people engage in this behavior?
De-platforming horrible material is better than nothing, but it feels like whack-a-mole
No I wouldn't. Google is not necessarily wrong here. The issue is that you cannot easily 'own' a part of the internet, despite much of our life playing out there.
In the real world, if no one wants to host you and your group, the standard answer is to acquire money and buy your own land, your own broadcasting, etc. On the internet, this is much harder for 'normal' people to do, requiring them to use services like Google.
Look, once parler was taken down, I purchased several servers off ebay, rented colocation space, and set up my own services. But I have the technical know-how to actually 'own' part of the internet without depending on anyone else. Most people can't really do this. Thus they depend on Google, et al, who are not selling them something akin to a land title, which is what people feel they ought to have, but rather a service.
The reason people got Mad at AWS for taking down parler is because to the common man's mind, when Parler pays for its "website" (because let's be honest, that's as deep as most people go), it 'owns' it, and it ought to be able to hold title to that thing in perpetuity, like land. People felt upset because they felt that amazon simply seized what they perceived to be the equivalent of land or personal property.
Of course websites are different because they require active serving by a computer, and parler was paying AWS to do that and Amazon decided not to. But that's not how people view it.
To top it off, people are scared because they don't know how to own anything on the internet. Even tech savvy people have no idea how to purchase or lease IP space, set up servers, routes, etc. It's all very confusing.
> once parler was taken down, I purchased several servers off ebay, rented colocation space, and set up my own services. But I have the technical know-how to actually 'own' part of the internet without depending on anyone else.
You said you rented colocation space. You (I assume) are paying a monthly fee for an Internet connection for your servers. You are absolutely depending on others who can be pressured just like AWS was with Parler. Don't kid yourself.
Sure, but the difference is that... if that happens, I own the computers. They can take down my internet connection (although I have multiple colocation centers owned by different people... I guess I could go international if I really want to add extra redundancy), but the computer is mine. The data on the drive is mine. They cannot touch this stuff. If they did, I can accuse them of larceny, and sue for damages.
It's written in the contract that they can take me offline, but they cannot touch my stuff. They can take it off the shelf for non-payment, but there's a period in which they have to retain it and offer it for pick-up.
This is wholly different than Amazon not only taking parler down, but also deleting the data, forcing them to download terabytes in three days, over a weekend.
And you're still right though. i don't actually own any IP space. In fact, IP space 'ownership' is handled by an NGO with little regulation. That's terrible. It ought to be governmental, because owning parts of the internet is an extremely important part of society. Too important to be left in any non-governmental organization's hands.
There are blockchain like systems that could solve this problem in a distributed fashion. There's also urbit. Or we could have proper governmental authority.
> In the real world, if no one wants to host you and your group, the standard answer is to acquire money and buy your own land, your own broadcasting, etc. On the internet, this is much harder for 'normal' people to do, requiring them to use services like Google.
If anything, it's easier since you can own a small plot of land and host a few servers in a building you throw together, instead of having to feed a bunch of people, buy large tracts, build a temple, etc.
Get a metro-e connection, and it doesn't matter how repulsive your legal content is - this isn't some residential connection bringing in <$100/month, they won't drop you until you become a liability (which is basically when the FBI comes knocking) because they make so much money on dedicated lines. (Plus, there's early termination clauses, and the last thing Comcast is going to do is pay that to appease a Twitter mob - what are you gonna do, switch ISPs? This is America, if you're using Comcast, it's probably because the next best thing is DSL.)
But it's not hard. Look at the mormon exodus. Look at how minority religions have pooled money to buy large tracts of land and large temples. It's fairly easy for a group of people to do this.
>The issue is that we know from experience, after 20+ years of the modern Internet, that if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race.
And that's just fine. People have the right to be assholes.
And it's your right to think that. But it's my right to think that containing the degree that people can be assholes makes for a better internet and a better world.
In the physical world, if people act badly enough, there will tend to be physical consequences. If someone goes up to a grandmother or little girl or whoever, and starts berating them with vile or threatening speech, they do so at the risk of finding themselves bloodied or worse. Everyone knows this can happen, and unless they are mentally ill, tend to learn at an early age to curtail such behavior behavior before something bad happens to them.
All this has had thousands of years to evolve to the current state, where in most places (at least in the first world), interacting with people in public places is generally pleasant and non-confrontational.
But online, it isn't that way. When there are zero repercussions, things become very unpleasant for all but... well, those assholes.
I get that you prefer such a world, but I don't. How do we work that out? Do we all adopt your way, simply because.... I dunno, I guess because that's what you want?
Oddly enough, there is not a strong business case in allowing the dregs of society to post their garbage all over your servers.
If Twitter adopted 4chan policies, it would be destroyed financially in short order.
Twitter is pretty loose compared to many of the big social sites. They allow nudity and porn, for example, but of course have rules such as marking it as sensitive. Try that on FB.
It is almost like they adopt polices that help their business. Just like brick and mortar businesses have policies on customer conduct and will ban trouble makers that impact their bottom line.
People have a right to be assholes but everyone else has the right to shun them from polite society.
There is no right to be heard, just to speak and not have the government stomp on you for it. No one else is required to listen or host it.
If I were hosting said Free Speech Drive, I would be oblivious to the contents of what my users host on their drives. I would not violate their privacy by spying on them. Their files, not mine.
If your site is widely used and you make it technically impossible for you see or moderate content in any way whatsoever, your site will become a host for real illegal content- not just the borderline examples I gave. As the comment above me notes, even 4chan removes CP. You place yourself in serious legal jeopardy with this decision
There is little legal distinction between a 'publisher' and a 'host', which I understand is part of the pseudolegal gibberish that's part of the 'content moderation is censorship' belief system.
If your physical storage unit is consistently used for illegal drug dealing despite several arrests there, and several warnings from law enforcement, then yes you'd probably be liable for that. If you had significant scale of illegal content on Free Speech Drive, then yes you absolutely do face liability. I guess if you think you have a clever legal argument otherwise, you're free to spend $100-500k on a defense attorney to make that argument after your public arrest, while your name comes up online for 'Illegal Content Provider' for all time
A private business is a private business and they can set their rules as they please as long as it doesn't run afoul of laws (ADA in the states for example).
That you think there is some important distinction where Google loses rights that Ma and Pa's store has shows that you have nothing reasonable to offer.
If you want to know what a "free speech zone" is on the internet go spend time on 4chan. I can't imagine anyone spending long periods of time there without harming their mental health... and that's even with some moderation.
I'm convinced the only way to effectively create free speech on the internet is to tie whatever you say online with personal identification. Not because it will prevent people from saying bad things, but because you could use it to ban people from the internet. (for the record, I think that's a horrible idea... but so is free speech on privately owned servers)
> Jailbait or non-nude pics of someone's teenage daughter, hosted in the thousands
Even worse, imagine there was a technology that allowed you to print those jailbait photos by the thousands and drop them in Times Square. That would be far too dangerous.
Imagine if that technology was used to spread misinformation about the Catholic church.
Ban the printing press! It's too dangerous. It should be controlled by the church and the state!
Even better, get rid of religion and intertwine religious righteousness with politics. Then the state can control it all!
> The issue is that we know from experience, after 20+ years of the modern Internet, that if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race. Then, let's say you personally were in charge of said Free Speech Drive- every day you'd get up and hear about people using it for (legal) jailbait photos, Islamic State recruiting, collaboration between extremist militia groups in various countries (including your own), actual illegal content, and so on. Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that?
Imagine if there was some kind of website or network that existed for years with barely no rules or enforcement, like image boards that only remove CP or a decentralized anonymizing network with even decentralized payment systems.
That would be the end of the world.
Right, and I left this out of my already-lengthy comment just so it wasn't a total wall of text. If you can easily host your 'censored' ideas on some other corner of the Internet- what exactly is the problem? Why are you entitled to Google's private property, specifically? You've been asked to leave one establishment, and are free to simply go elsewhere.
We've entered a Golden Age for radical/controversial content- totally unthinkable freedom to say or read anything that would've been technically impossible even in the 80s. It's actually the opposite of censorship- never have people been so free to express any view, thanks to the Internet. I'm not really clear the level of hysteria over Google Drive's policies, specifically- 4chan or another site just like 4chan will always be there
> Google's increasing role as an arbiter of right vs wrong
The problem is that (I doubt) Google is really doing this out of some misguided attempt at "protecting" people but rather as a reaction to what they perceive to be what the people want. When America was a very religious (Christian) country, media distributors stayed away from anything that appeared "blasphemous". They didn't necessarily do it because there was a law against it (there were some odd laws here and there, but the media didn't start actually challenging them until religion really fell out of favor), but because they were afraid of consumer reactions. Google (and every other tech company) is doing essentially the same thing here: speaking ill on certain topics is modern-day heresy and they just don't want to be attached to it because they do ultimately fear the consumer.
Even if you found a globally adoptable alternative to google, the same people who pushed Google to ban distribution of "misleading content" would start looking for ways to ban your globally adoptable alternative - at the network level if necessary (look what happened to Parler before they agreed to follow the unwritten rules). At the end of the day, we won't have truly free speech because far too few of us really want truly free speech.
>speaking ill on certain topics is modern-day heresy
The AUP would be more transparent if it simply banned "modern-day heresy". Folks would then be tagged as tech-heretics, and many would wear that badge with honor.
Calling questionable, unproven, unpopular or ambiguous information "misleading"-- it's a doublespeak. Worse, having my cloud drive spontaneously dumping or blocking my data because some algorithm or faceless reviewer disagrees with the content-- that's totally unacceptable as a consumer proposition. Is my Android phone next simply because I'm posting an HN comment Google might disagree with? Seriously, it's completely unworkable from a consumer position for Google to arrogate to themselves that power.
That's not how heresy works. People don't point fingers at you and hiss "heretic!", instead they judge you and think you're a terrible human being who does terrible things so they shouldn't help or associate with you. You can't "simply ban" heresy.
If you're genuinely interested in convincing people across the aisle to stop trying to ban stuff like this, simply yelling that it's "totally unacceptable as a consumer proposition" and "completely unworkable" and "doublespeak" is barely an argument. Evidently, many consumers are accepting it and will continue to accept it.
> That's not how heresy works. People don't point fingers at you and hiss "heretic!"
I mean...yes that's exactly what they did. Excommunication, run out of town, branded, marked, labeled in public, put in stocks, jailed, killed, yelled at, or just straight ostracized. These are all tactics that have been used in the past to label and punish heretical beliefs. They could absolutely still be used and, if you look at "cancel culture" in the right/wrong light, that's exactly what's still happening.
My point is not that people don't ostracize heretics, it's that "heretics" aren't a real category that people identify explicitly. Heresy is not a thing, people don't think "you were a heretic" as the reason they're ostracizing you (look, maybe 12th century peasants did, that's beside my point, we're talking about modern politics). People who want to ban these things don't think of this as "banning heresy", they think of it as "banning a bunch of terrible things to benefit society". If you're just going to dismiss these people's perspective as banning "heresy", you're just talking past them. You're not earnestly engaging them in argument.
In a sense that may be true, but how is that different from a bar owner asking people to leave if they are causing a disturbance by being confrontational with other patrons? The bar owner doesn't want a fight that can damage property. He doesn't want people to avoid the bar because someone is picking fights, when most of his clientele just want to kick back and socialize with their friends.
Maybe the bar owner isn't trying to "protect" the rest of his customers, he's just trying to maintain a profitable business. Protecting his pockets.
You could apply the same logic to dang, who helps keep HN a pleasant place by doing the same things the bar owner is doing. Yes I imagine he is paid a salary, by the management of YCombinator who see HN as one part of their strategy to make a profit, and therefore his motives are equally cynical.
Ok. Honestly, you can probably reduce all human behavior to such simplistic motives if you want. What I see as someone being kind, you might see as a purely Darwinian strategy to get their genes in future generations.
I'm not all that sure that is a helpful perspective, at least not most of the time.
> America was a very religious (Christian) country
America is still a very religious country. It's not as bad as it used to be but it's still pretty bad.
Don't forget that these companies are global. Your example is still happening with pictures of Muhammad. Many companies refuse to host or show them for fear of offending Islamic extremists.
Oh Thank You. That is an interesting take I haven't thought about.
For those us not from US, it this "as a reaction to what they perceive to be what the people want."
really represent the majority as in your example when America was very religious?
Because it seems to me, ( and I know zip about US ) this action only please half and anger another half?
Given the amount of information Google has about its users I feel certain that they know exactly what percentage will be angered by this and what percentage will either applaud it or just not care.
It's not only right wingers but left wing organizations like the Atlantic Council. They assist multiple companies in determining which content is deemed permissible.
I think there's a vacuum here in that society wants someone to intervene when Bad Things Happen, but we either can't agree who that should be or (more likely IMO) the right choice of person/organization just doesn't exist. So you end up with some people/organizations/governments stepping up to increase their power and/or protect their own interests.
I think this is why Zuckerberg and some other big players have called for laws to regulate these things, which seems counterintuitive, but then FB can pass the buck and is more likely to maintain the status quo where they're on top. But until they are more insulated from the risks, they're going to be forced to defend themselves.
This is also probably why Google is advocating for the privacy sandbox and banning third-party-cookies, and staying ahead of the law tech-wise. Such that when the inevitable regulation of the playing field does come, they are sharing drinks and chuckling with the referees, while the other players are still struggling to figure out what their game plan is.
It's also easier for FB/etc to push for laws to be written when they can pour millions into a PAC to get their ideal language into those bills, if not straight up write sections themselves. They can lobby for fines that are lower than profit from acting in bad faith or anti-competitively (who even knows how much money FB saved by buying out Instagram/etc), they can run their own disinformation or targeted campaigns to sway public opinion, or simply minimize anything on their platform to hide it from users. There's a massive power imbalance there between a regular voter and Zuckerberg/etc, even an imbalance between a regular voters who can or cannot vote early or by mail.
I support regulating these groups but that must be done within the right assigned via the constitution, existing precedent where available, and in depth knowledge of how these companies operate and how the tech influences consumers. It's complicated.
Google docs etc aren't even Google's inventions, Google just bought them. I think it's important to emphasize that, to dispel the notion that you need to be a big company to make a product like that.
I agree that you do not have to be a big company to make a product like that, but it seems like you have to be a big company in order to host and deliver it.
> I agree that you do not have to be a big company to make a product like that, but it seems like you have to be a big company in order to host and deliver it.
The tragedy isn't in what you've said, but rather what you haven't said. The implication is already that a product of GDocs/GSheets quality should be free, as part of a large company's moat, rather than a paid for product that people will pay for.
The tragic reality is thanks to these large companies turning what would otherwise be successful standalone businesses, into free additional features.
I've used that word because Steve Jobs famously described Dropbox as a feature. Google has effectively made MS Office a feature. Apple effectively made operating systems a feature, by giving away macOS and iOS for free with their hardware sales.
Increasingly, everything becomes a feature, in search of what? For big tech, it's to sell users attention.
Meanwhile, on the other side, big media is charging us to give them our attention...
Nah. Hosting is cheaper than it's ever been at any time in history, the costs only become a concern if you have lots of users in which case you should be generating lots of revenue to pay for the increased hosting costs.
Have you ever been on-call for any project larger than a toy? If you have, you likely noticed that keeping the whole thing up sometimes takes effort, more effort than meets the eye.
Hosting as in having some code deployed to some machines is indeed cheap. Keeping a large app like g.docs up and running, especially without breaking the bank, is a bit more tricky.
> Have you ever been on-call for any project larger than a toy? If you have, you likely noticed that keeping the whole thing up sometimes takes effort, more effort than meets the eye.
Of course, that applies to literally every piece of production software ever, but keeping a webpapp running really isn't that hard, it's honestly the bare minimum of competent software development, if you have a team of SREs up at 3am triaging the site every night you're doing something wrong. Now of course, when you get to google scale, you will encounter unique problems, but if you're at google scale your business has more than enough revenue to pay for the costs.
My experience as well. Web apps - if made slightly streamlined and lightweight - with thousands of visitors a month is easy peasy on cheap webhosting.
Google is another scale ofcourse. That's like comparing elephants with mosquitos.
Ofcourse there's more to hosting. But that's what the hosting company does! The webhosting landscape - at least here in Europe - is perfect: worldclass technology, local service. I can be on the phone with these companies if there's a problem.
Hosting stuff that hosts content some people find "problematic" has its own additional layers of difficulty. Amazon is completely willing to dump you if they disagree with you.
No you have to be a big company to resist the urge of getting bought out.
Or you have to either have aspirations of becoming a big platform company or a plan to survive and be happy watching big companies push you to fifth place in a category you once dominated.
The question isn't whether you need to be a big company or not, it's where you're gonna get the money.
What you'd need to host/deliver something like Docs/Sheets is: a product team (2 QE, 8 SWEng, 3 SRE, 1 product owner), the product, some cloud infrastructure, and the capital to pay for it. You could go larger than that to build it, but that is plenty of people to run/maintain/support it. Assuming "large scale" is between 1M and 100M users, figure between $750K and $3M for infra. Combine that with median salaries for employees, and you're lookin' at between $1.75M and $4M (before taxes/business fees).
If you use the cheapest infrastructure and labor, you could do it for $500K. (it is mind-blowing how cheap offshore labor is. Google engineers get paid almost 8 times what some of our contractors get paid, for about the same work)
VCs throw that much cash around for a weekend trip to French vineyards. If you can actually get paying customers, even better.
> Google docs etc aren't even Google's inventions, Google just bought them.
That's the same thing as saying that macOS Monterey isn't Apple's invention, they just copied Xerox.
There's years of development on what Google bought and what Docs suite is now and any engineer that had developed a product for years shouldn't say silly stuff like your sentence.
> We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information.
How naive. The reality is terrible, probably much more than what you can imagine. Let's assume that someone tries to find out teenager victims for cybersex trafficking at a massive scale on your proposed infrastructure with "free-flowing information". How will you stop them from doing so? Is it just a hypothetical scenario? No. This actually happened on Telegram, which refused official government's order to shut down the chatting room on a victim's request.
Please don't underestimate how far average people's malice can go. Both private and governmental intervention exist not just because of "good intentions", but it come from the real demands from the society.
Google could be sued if they helped distribute dangerous misleading health-information.
It's really not about their "good intentions" but about their self-interest.
It's not about freedom of speech either. Everybody has the right to say whatever they want, and Google has the right not to distribute it. Free markets 101.
The fact that Google has de facto monopoly in some areas is a problem that government needs to deal with.
Google (and all other providers) can not be sued for their users distributing "dangerous" or whatever content. This is literally the purpose of section 230. The only exception is the sex trafficking stuff covered under SESTA/FOSTA.
Whatever pressure they're getting to do this comes from somewhere besides the threat of private civil lawsuits.
They can only be sued now because they are trying to filter out content. Therefore anything remaining is intentional.
I think it would be better to not take proactive filtering based on what they think is misleading and to instead rely on legal judgements to remove info.
Misleading people isn’t illegal (in the US at least, currently). There are situations where it is and that would be a good line for Google to take.
Now I want them to be sued enough times to make them stop doing this.
Why do we not allow telephone companies to censor our conversations? Why can't the power company choose not provide power to offices for political campaigns they disagree with?
We afford monopolies certain privileges, but we also require monopolies to have certain restraints.
Many of these large tech companies have become natural monopolies. I think its reasonable to expect similar restraints.
I agree with you on restraints on natural monopolies. That should come in the form of limiting their anti-competitive behavior and probably also harvesting user data unconsentually for profit.
But regarding limiting these companies from being able to decide which speech they don't want to host: I don't think you've thought this out fully.
What speech should they be forced to host? Art? Disinformation? Propaganda? Porn? Spam? Terrorism? For illegal speech: Whose laws should they be forced to obey?
With respect, no speech should be illegal, regardless of how absurd, abhorrent, or inaccurate the speech is to anyone. Free speech is fundamental to a truly free society, full stop.
You disagree with your own statement and you don't even know it!
"No speech should be illegal" - should I be able to threaten people then? That's speech. Should I be able to detail my plans for how I'm going to commit a crime? That's speech.
Should I be able to scream at the top of my lungs in a public space?
Should I be able to use a loudspeaker to broadcast my voice (or an advertisement) to drown out all other sound in a public space?
It sounds nice what you're saying, but it's not what you actually believe, so I kindly ask you to argue less in bad faith.
You're right. We should make exceptions to free speech only for recklessly, knowingly, or intentionally:
-making unreasonable noise and continuing to do so after being asked to stop
-disrupting a lawful assembly of persons
-speech made for the principal purpose of creating panic
-if the speaker intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely.
My solution to the original problem would be to make it technologically unfeasible to solve. The architecture of the communication platform should be constrained in such a way that operators & owners are unable to make choices about which speech to include. This is because nobody is equipped to solve this problem, and nobody should be forced to do anything to try and solve it.
Disinformation, and propaganda are just specific types of protected free speech. I disagree with socialism, but communist propaganda is protected speech which should be allowed. Disinformation can be dangerous too, I understand that. But i'm not willing to allow Google or my government to make a decision on what is disinformation.
As for everything else. You should clearly follow the laws of the country you are doing business in.
> Please tell me why a private company should be forced to host content that they fundamentally disagree with.
Prior to the civil rights act, companies didn’t serve certain people based on their race because they disagreed with that race.
It’s not that Google should be forced to carry stuff, they should be forced to not discriminate because they don’t like it. ISIS propaganda is illegal and should be taken down for that reason.
> It’s not that Google should be forced to carry stuff, they should be forced to not discriminate because they don’t like it. ISIS propaganda is illegal and should be taken down for that reason.
Bright-line rules like that worry me. This is, a lot of stuff is subjective -- the line between "legal" and "illegal" isn't so clear or immutable as one might naively guess. So if something more binary -- like host-or-remove -- is tied to such a fuzzy, dynamic determinant, it'd seem to give rise to all sorts of problems.
For example, say we forced big companies to host all legal content, but remove all illegal content, and then we want to know if something controversial is legal (e.g., taxes on Bitcoin back when it was newer). Then someone could post two images: one telling people to pay taxes on Bitcoin, and another telling people to not pay taxes on Bitcoin. Then the hosting-company would have to remove exactly one of those. By contrast, a hosting-company could normally just remove stuff they're unsure about because they're not required to host legal content, sparing them the burden of having to properly determine the legality of everything.
Basically, the problem is that we'd be stripping hosting-companies of their freedom to operate in safe-waters, forcing them into murky areas and then opening them up to punishment whenever they fail to correctly navigate those murky waters.
If hosting-companies become responsible for determining what's legal/illegal, then they'll have reasonable cause to become an authority on the topic.
It'd probably make them more influential and powerful rather than less, because their judgements would carry the implication of legal-determination, and in popular perception, be law.
They'd essentially be elevated to the status of being lower-courts.
I wasn’t thinking they would be responsible for determining legal or illegal. That would be determined by courts and the legal system. For example, libel/slander would require a judgement, not the provider saying they think it’s libel/slander.
It sounds like you're proposing that they have to remove illegal-content, but host legal-content, right?
For example: say someone's advertising a new drug of questionable legality (say, Δ-8-THC). Presumably a hosting-company, unsure of legality, would just take that down for violating their policies -- without necessarily asserting that it's illegal.
But if you're proposing that they can't do that, then presumably they'd be forced into making a clear determination on its legality (as they must host it if legal, and must remove it if not). Right?
---
Actually, just to mix crypto in:
Say someone posts a time-locked encrypted-file (a file encrypted such that it'll open after a few hours/days/weeks/months/whatever), and there's reasonable suspicion that it may contain illegal content -- but a hosting-company isn't sure yet, because it was just posted and no one's completed unlocking it yet. Should they be forced to host it?
Now say that an entire community springs up around this: many of the files end up being perfectly legal, while others turn out to be very illegal. How should a hosting-company react?
Calls to violence, images of chopped off heads, etc.
If it’s literally just assholes saying “ISIS is great” then that shouldn’t be taken down. Just like if two ISIS-lovers are
IMing each other messages about how much they love ISIS and nothing else illegal it should be allowed. I think.
In the US, images of chopped off heads aren't illegal. Calls to violence are illegal, but only in very particular circumstances that it's unlikely ISIS propoganda videos would meet
Exactly this. A lot of the conservative angst about having their speech moderated on private platforms would vanish if they realized the baggage that came along with what they were asking for. The first amendment is extremely permissive, only very narrow limits are allowed and 99% of pro-ISIS speech is perfectly legal.
Not at all. But I would like to see legislation (or some strong rule) that forces huge corporations or companies over a certain market share to host all legal content.
Similar to how television broadcasters have regulations that that force them to provide equal time to all major candidates.
I think there’s some reasonable threshold that doesn’t require small providers to host everything.
Equal time for TV hasn’t been a thing for decades. And it was justified because TVs used the public airwaves. I don’t know how you could write a law that would pass constitutional muster. And it seems very unlikely that you could get a constitutional amendment through on this topic.
Yes. Any company with an user base or influence above a certain threshold should not get to make moderation decisions unilaterally without the input of society at large. That input is called "the law".
The argument would be the magnitude of their impact on how a member of society can search for, view or transmit information is too large for Google to be deemed a private company.
If a private company impacts a nation's states democracy to such an extent that it rivals it in power, they ought to be classified as something else.
So, in your opinion, what should a government force the company to do when they are classified as what you describe? Force them to host all speech? Does that include art? Disinformation? Propaganda? Porn? Spam? Terrorism?
I don't think you've thought out the consequences of what you're advocating for.
If you have thought it out, please explain exactly what speech they should be forced to host and what speech they shouldn't be.
Right. I personally never thought it was that complicated.
Once a company is classified as a public utility (I believe Google is) it should be forced to host all legal content. You tell me what's illegal and I can safely tell you it can't be hosted by Google.
By whose laws? Even within the US, there are plenty of different laws. Should it be an intersection of all laws, everywhere? Only content which is lawful around the world? Or regionally? Should people outside those regions be segmented off from content that isn't in their region?
Moreover, you're saying that spam should be forced to be hosted by these companies, just like our snail-mail protects. Even if it takes up Exabytes of information.
Should people who have their content removed be able to sue these companies for removing it?
They are American companies, they therefore fall under American laws.
Just with Twitter, we know that content is regulated by region. Setting your location to Germany will prohibit seeing certain content from the U.S. Many more such regional cases.
The spam example would be a problem, but it's more of an annoyance to solve than a basic human rights case. You simply cannot have a democracy where segments of the population are barred from interacting with public officials online. Especially when public business (advertising, fundraising, making political arguments) is now a core of online communications.
If you're saying US companies (that classify as whatever you're defining them as) should be forced to carry all legal speech, no matter how terrible or cruel or provocative it is, I'd be okay with this, and that means literally all spam, and that admins would not be able to moderate any legal speech. If it's any less than this, I'm not okay with what you're advocating for.
And effectively this would turn these sites into platforms that are so filled with trash they will be unusable. And the chaotic part of me would love to see that happen. But it means basically the end of these companies to function.
Realistically, I think we should keep to the standard we've had in the past: we can't compel companies to host speech they disagree with, and we should take strong measures to limit their anti-competitive behavior and break them up into competing companies if necessary (like we did with telecom)
I don't want to keep arguing. Mostly informative exchange.
I would say though, Twitters model from around 2012 was extremely open compared with today (remember the Arab Spring?) and in no way was it an unusable, trash/spam laden platform.
Don't be disingenuous. The problem is viewpoint discrimination. Spam isn't a viewpoint. Porn isn't a viewpoint. Libel isn't a viewpoint. We can limit the ability of tech companies to arbitrarily censor points of view while still keeping the platform free of spam.
How? Create a cause of action whereby if a tech company removes someone's content, that person can go to court and ask that a judge determine whether that content removal is some kind of anti-spam operation or viewpoint censorship. You don't let the company have the final say.
The first amendment is going to be a problem. According to the Supreme Court, those companies have the same first amendment rights that you do. Compelled speech is frowned upon.
> According to the Supreme Court, those companies have the same first amendment rights that you do.
No, those companies don't have first amendment rights. Commercial speech has always been more limited than personal speech. If the law worked like you claim, common carrier laws for railroads would be unconstitutional because they'd violate railroad company freedom of association. These laws are, in fact, constitutional, and so will be the laws that stop big tech censorship.
Besides: corporations? Rights? Total bullshit. This country ought to be run for the benefit of its citizens, not abstract entities like big tech companies. A corporation is an artificial construct that can exist only because society --- made up of humans --- determines that the corporation is in society's best interest. When a corporation is no longer in the best interest of the humans that make up the world, screw the corporation.
Once again, a candidate not being able to post to Youtube is not a threat to democracy. Nothing is stopping this candidate from posting this on their campaign site, or an RNC affiliated site or even Facebook where most of their supporters are likely to be.
> Once again, a candidate not being able to post to Youtube is not a threat to democracy.
Yes it is. Youtube is a huge conduit for communication.
Imagine if ABC banned a candidate. The argument that there’s still CBS and NBC are available is not relevant as a major media outlet is favoring a candidate by blocking their opponents.
For small outlets it’s not an issue. But YouTube is the biggest video provider on the planet, not allowing a political candidate would be detrimental to democracy.
Even if that candidate said stupid stuff like “world is flat.” People have to make their decision and as long as we’re a democracy, that choice should be individual.
If you don't have a big enough chance at winning, you don't go to debates
Mind you, news networks recently had a very strong preference towards the incumbent president, aligning their news to match the president's talking points, and having nightly calls to align their messages
YouTube would be literally interfering with a democratic election. If threat is too strong a word, fine. But you can't deny that they are actively participating in public elections. We want that? We want to privatize democracy? I don't.
Yeah google de-indexing all pages criticizing the democrats and the company is also not threat to democracy. They must provide us with a curated set of sound information vetted by the politicians, FAANG and the state department.
Can we at least agree on some basic facts? Google does in fact curate search. Where a page is listed does not depend on how many times the link was clicked. Yes?
>If you want your right-wing search engine, then create it.
And your true intentions come out.
If Google delists AOC from all their properties in the next election and replaces the results with those from her opposition, I'm sure you'll be the first to say it's totally fine and she should just host her own search site if she doesn't like it.
> Please tell me why a private company should be forced to host content that they fundamentally disagree with. Why should Google be forced, legally, to carry Chinese state propaganda, for example? Why should Google be forced, legally, to carry ISIS propaganda?
They already do host them. CloudFlare, the biggest CDN, despite their words and claims routinely censors sites meanwhile defending hosting terrorist site's free speech.
> the company serves at least seven groups on the U.S. State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Shabab, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), al-Quds Brigades, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and Hamas.
> CEP has sent letters to Cloudflare since February 13, 2017, warning about clients on the service, including Hamas, the Taliban, the PFLP, and the Nordic Resistance Movement. The latest letter, from February 15, 2019, warns of what CEP identified as three pro-ISIS propaganda websites.
CF claims terrorist organization's websites are free speech:
As for the whole "private speech" argument, so, Rosa Parks should have just started her own bus company too? Discriminating against people based on race was legal after all. And if race is a "different" topic, then how about religion? Religion is based on ideas. These tech companies claim to censor religion based offensive content too. But almost all LGBT content is against all religion. Isn't that offensive too and should be censored too? And just like religion is based on ideas, political opinions are ideas too.
Railroads, telecom, electricity and water companies should be able to refuse service too?
Are you against the FDA, EPA, FCC, FEC, COPPA regulations, regulations of fire insurance rates etc?
How about Net Neutrality? Private businesses should be able to charge whatever they want and for whatever content they want right?
How about the government-forced lockdowns forcing private businesses to shut down and go bankrupt?
And how about the baker who refused to bake cake for the gay couple for religious reasons?
How about the current Administration banning menthol cigarettes, flavoured cigars?
How about government banning incandescent light bulbs?
How about Fauci's emails where he's emailing with Zuckerberg (some of which was also redacted). Fauci is the government and him working together with FB in building their "COVID dashboard" which censored many people, especially those talking about the lab leak theory as well as Ivermectin. Is that not government enforced censorship?
There's a whole community on TikTok (you can find them here on Twitter, too) which scorns people as "fatphobic" for encouraging fitness and weight loss. They falsely say obesity isn't unhealthy. Should that be allowed considering that's also "misleading/misinformation"? Are social media companies that allow it "killing people" (Biden's words from today)? Are social media companies also guilty of "killing people" if they allow content encouraging people to be obese, to consume fatty junk food, content which glorifies cigarette smoking and large amounts of alcohol consumption and a sedentary lifestyle?
Seems like the "it's a private business" crowd is totally okay with government enforced regulations and lockdowns for their political benefit but when it comes to political speech of their opposition, they suddenly discover the "private" business.
SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas opined couple months ago discussing big tech censorship quite extensively. The case was regarding whether President Trump was allowed to block people on Twitter and it being a 1st amendment violation. While the case was declared moot as President Trump left office, Justice Clarence Thomas took the opportunity to discuss censorship. How politicians like President Trump aren't allowed to block users on big tech but big tech is able to block and ban government employees and how this creates a weird power dynamic. Here's a few excerpts:
> "But whatever may be said of other industries, there is clear historical precedent for regulating transportation and communications networks in a similar manner as traditional common carriers. Candeub 398–405. Telegraphs, for example, because they “resemble[d] railroad companies and other common carriers,” were “bound to serve all customers alike, without discrimination." ... "Internet platforms of course have their own First Amendment interests, but regulations that might affect speech are valid if they would have been permissible at the time of the founding. See United States v. Stevens, 559 U. S. 460, 468 (2010). The long history in this country and in England of restricting the exclusion right of common carriers and places of public accommodation may save similar regulations today from triggering heightened scrutiny—especially where a restriction would not prohibit the company from speaking or force the company to endorse the speech." ... "The similarities between some digital platforms and common carriers or places of public accommodation may give legislators strong arguments for similarly regulating digital platforms. [I]t stands to reason that if Congress may demand that telephone companies operate as common carriers, it can ask the same of ”digital platforms." ... "For example, although a “private entity is not ordinarily constrained by the First Amendment,” Halleck, 587 U. S., at ___, ___ (slip op., at 6, 9), it is if the government coerces or induces it to take action the government itself would not be permitted to do, such as censor expression of a lawful viewpoint. Ibid. Consider government threats. “People do not lightly disregard public officers’ thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around.” Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, 372 U. S. 58, 68 (1963). The government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly. See ibid.; Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U. S. 991, 1004–1005 (1982). Under this doctrine, plaintiffs might have colorable claims against a digital plat- form if it took adverse action against them in response to government threats. The Second Circuit feared that then-President Trump cut off speech by using the features that Twitter made available to him. But if the aim is to ensure that speech is not smoth- ered, then the more glaring concern must perforce be the dominant digital platforms themselves."
> "As Twitter made clear, the right to cut off speech lies most powerfully in the hands of private digital platforms. The extent to which that power matters for purposes of the First Amendment and the extent to which that power could lawfully be modified raise interesting and important questions. This petition, unfortunately, affords us no opportunity to confront them."
The last 2 points are important as Justice Thomas is basically saying "give us a case which brings up these two questions and then we will have a deep look."
Also based on recent revelations of things like Press Secretary Psaki admitting that they are flagging content *FOR* Facebook, advocating for censoring any person from all social media if they are censored on only one social media as well as Fauci's emails showing him actively emailing with Zuckerberg on the COVID news which led to censoring of anyone who brought up the lab leak theory, this makes these companies State actions and not private companies.
Do they routinely censor? As far as I can tell they do not 'routinely' do this. As a matter of course, they routinely do the opposite. There are only two examples I can think of where they have censored.
I know there are a ton of people who, like you, want alternatives. Unfortunately nobody is willing to pay for it.
Advertisers (and governments and criminals) pay handsomely for surveillance-driven "free" platforms, but who will pay for the development, maintenance, productization, polish, and support of open decentralized alternatives? Users have been conditioned to believe that software should be free, and the more ideological people in the FOSS movement will tell you it's "not open source" if you don't give it away with no strings attached. I know people who will actually uninstall things if they do not have an OSI-compliant license.
Look at how much work it takes to develop and maintain these centralized systems. Now consider that decentralized systems are more challenging to develop and scale because you have to deeply understand distributed systems instead of just hacking some code to run on one centrally managed 100% trusted platform.
Where is the army of independently wealthy highly skilled developers who are going to do all this unpaid?
I am not optimistic. Nobody pays for freedom, openness, or privacy. All the money and momentum is behind the current user-exploiting paradigm, and now we have a generation of programmers who are learning "cloud native" development and don't even know how to develop things that don't run this way.
Edit:
I once gave a presentation to a room of college kids and was discussing a peer to peer system. A student raised his hand and asked how two devices could communicate this way without "a cloud." He was not aware that it was possible for something to communicate directly with something else over a network without a server.
This problem is not nearly close to being solved, but if you look at the more general area around "crypto"(currency), lots of projects are exploring novel forms of funding development, maintenance and usage of decentralized networks, either for themselves or as generalized solutions[1].
(Obligatory disclaimer pre-acknowledging the drive-by comments when mentioning anything crypto on HN: yes there are lots of scams, yes lots of illegal activity uses these networks, yes blockchain is often used as a buzzword)
I was optimistic about cryptocurrency, but the problem I see is that the bad drives out the good. There are so many scams that the very idea is now linked to scams in the mind of a huge number of people, driving away a ton of people who might otherwise use it for things that are not scams.
It's the "bad neighborhood effect." A few people commit crimes, so a neighborhood becomes known as "bad." The people who don't commit crimes move out. Now most of the neighborhood's residents are criminals.
A lot of financial regulation is about maintaining the reputation of markets so that serious people will use them. If too many scams, bubbles, and other nonsense goes down, the market gets an overall bad reputation.
I think this effect certainly plays a big part in slowing down progress on fundamental research in an otherwise hyper-active field. But the good thing about open technologies is that they can act like neutral tools and not neighborhoods.
Decentralization allows anyone to start their own bubble with however much curation they want. If you want crypto without scams, it's very easy to achieve. Let's not forget how terrible a reputation the whole "world wide web" had just 2 decades ago, and yet here we are complaining how locked-down and ultimately "too safe" it has become.
The space will change with more regard for fundamental aspects of the platforms' technology, than transient feelings about its current ecosystem.
> I know there are a ton of people who, like you, want alternatives. Unfortunately nobody is willing to pay for it.
I don't know, I pay for O365. I know a lot of people that do. And remember; Google Drive is not free either. To get more than a minimal amount of storage you have to pay. As a result, most serious users of these services are already paying for them.
However, we end up paying AND keep getting judgement on our data. It really should be E2E encrypted and these conditions should only apply for files that are actually shared with external people.
However, I've heard many stories of people getting their accounts banned for having copyrighted content on their drive that was never shared at any point.
If it wasn't for the fact that I mainly have O365 for other stuff (email in particular), I would never pay for OneDrive under these conditions. Imagine your computer suddenly going like "oh hey this is a downloaded movie, you shouldn't have this!!" and deleting it from its harddrive. Or worse, even forbidding you to log in and access any of your data.
Ridiculous of course but this is the situation we now have with online storage. I back my OneDrive up every day for this reason.
You can encrypt stuff to Google Drive. You can sync a Truecrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/) folder or use something like Syncdocs (https://syncdocs.com) that does the encryption/decryption automatically.
> whose best interests are provably not aligned with that of the general population.
Hell always comes when people feel they know what's best for everyone else, and attempt to forcibly implement it.
I'm for people being free to choose what they believe their own individual self interest is. Even if it isn't what others imagine it to be. Even if those others are right.
> We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information.
Who's going to pay for and operate it? And why won't they be subject to the same pressures that got us here?
Maybe it time we make it easy for people to host thier own clouds… Like Nextcloud. All in one at home server with Owncloud Plug-N-Play. While we are at it, have it ready to go for hosting emails and Federated Social Media.
To be honest, it would be a challange, but totally doable.
This is techno-utopianism. The problem isn't technical. Your grandparents won't figure out how to host their own cloud or use Mastodon. Your friends who work at art galleries or in construction won't figure it out either. The reason centralized services proliferate is that they cater to the vast majority of people who don't care about this stuff.
"How do we limit the harm of misinformation while preserving our freedoms?" That's a political problem. We can't just code our way out.
This is what most people here dont seem to understand. If you are banned from Facebook/Youtube/Google/Twitter, for the mainstream public (That is, 90% of the people) you are effectively banished from the Internet. This is like a candidate not being covered in the NY Times, WP,LA Times, but it is OK because the "Quarterly Express" in "Chinook county" published a 2-pages interview.
ISPs have shown increasing comfort with delisting sites they deem bad. I'm a huge proponent of commoditizing data hosting, but the culture today leans heavily toward "filtering" information.
It's not really culture. It's a small minority of radical extremists who get their own way repeatedly by threatening meltdowns out of all proportion to the severity of the problem, and emotionally manipulating their own managers ("you're a bad person if you don't do this"). And they do it again and again, until the organization starts to collapse and becomes a mere tool for their political agendas.
The best way to push back on this is not some p2p techno fix. It's to systematically start firing anyone in an organization who demands the moral cleansing of customers or colleagues.
ISP Censorship is next on their list… They are going to push normal discorse underground and bad ideas will just fester instead of being natually filtered out in the proving grounds of public discorse.
A "public square" online designation would effectively be the nationalization of whatever service gets that designation.
I, for one, don't think the US government should be in charge of Twitter.
Taking private companies and forcing them to say certain things is not how I'd like this country to evolve, and as long as the 1st Amendment exists, is not how it will evolve. "Public Square" designations for private companies cannot exist alongside the 1st Amendment, period.
I agree, but my solution was self_hosted at home, not on big tecks slippery back. But I guess the same could be said by your ISP.
Although with the increasing use of private gaming servers and streaming, ISP’s are starting to acommadate the gen_pop with decent upload bandwith finally.
Who know, it wont be long untill ISP’s start filtering content on a massive scale.
Hanlon's razor has really messed up people's discernment. There are plenty of amoral, if not malicious, decisions by these companies, and these behaviors are intentional. All you HN commenters think you see the consequences clearly, and the execs making these decisions are doe-eyed innocents led down the wrong path... Are you serious?
> We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information.
Yes! And the way we do it is simple: amend the US Constitution to abolish copyright and patents and ensure people have the right to intellectual freedom.
Are we, as humans, entitled to a certain level of UX, or are we simply entitled to the ability to share information?
Because if it's the former, then yeah Google itself needs to be replicated and provided for all humanity. If it's the latter, well what does FTP not have?
I'm having a very hard time seeing how one specific implementation of any technology becomes so important that to live without it is to be deprived of a human right.
You need to remember that people actually wanted Google and tech companies to be arbiters of truth and moderate content. This is what people asked for, so the real issue probably has to do with why people are comfortable with giving this amount of power to companies like Google in the first place.
"We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on a globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information."
Google's job is to take away the motivation to do this work.
Alernatively, if it looks like someone is doing it, hire or acquire them.
You agree not to, and not to allow third parties or Your End Users, to use the Services:
to intentionally distribute hoaxes, or other items of a destructive or deceptive nature;
Your failure to comply with the AUP may result in suspension or termination, or both, of the Services pursuant to the Agreement.
The availability of paid email hosting and document creation, editing and storage is, IMO, an example of the point I was making.
If, e.g., businesses and other organisations were potentially upset about Gmail scanning (remember Google was sued for this and lost) then that dissatisfaction argubaly provides motivation to avoid Gmail.
That motivation could potentially spread outside of businesses and other organisations. Google's job is to take away such motivation.
Arguably Google Workspaces is Google doing its job of quelling a potential uprising, so to speak. They are taking away potential motivation to innovate away from Google and online advertising. (It also highlights the inherent flaws in a "free" services model. For many businesses and organisations, this is not acceptable.)
Meanwhile, the company's core business remains unchanged: providing services for "free" while generating billions in profits through online advertising services.
I always wonder if it will be challenging to get people used to the idea of paying for these services from a non-Google provider. Although Google hoovers up cash hand over fist (hence the high salaries), having a well-polished set of apps that work as well for low cost is going to be a hard pill to swallow for so many folks that are just used to "free email" by now.
I host my own email and pay about a dollar a month and my non-tech family members look at me like I'm some fool for not using the free stuff. Conversations about the value of data just go woosh over their heads :|
The alternative to Google is self-hosted Open Source and Free Software and it exists today. Unfortunately for you it isn't easy to find work on self-hosted FLOSS projects and there isn't much demand for consultants helping deploy those projects.
We developed an alternative to google and the services that it provides. It's part of a growing open source ecosystem that includes NextCloud for file management.
If you want a totally free and open source alternative to Facebook and Google, that you can run on your own servers, you can find it here:
Perhaps. But isn't google (and facebook, twitter etc) also in a bit of a no win situation? They implement these types of measure and they get accused of censorship and being "arbiter of right vs wrong". They don't and they get accused of helping spread fake news and false information.
Putting aside intent, cost etc. What can / should these companies do that'll make everyone happy?
For posterity, readers should note this comment was the OP, initially. Not the support.google.com link. 980+ comments later, HN changed the thread and buried semitones' comment down here. semitones' point was a reasonable and important one: maybe people should think twice about hosting files and other data with a company like Google.
I don't think the answer is alternatives, as you would just be trading one master for another.
What we need is 1) for clients to retain control of their data and 2) standardized formats and interfaces for handling data. If moving off of Facebook was as simple as creating an account somewhere else, then things would be different. If Google doesn't own your data you can tell them how they are allowed to use it.
As for Google, I've given up on anything revolutionary from them. They have a lot of smart people with good ideas but they've grown so big that they can't "move fast and break things" without breaking whole sectors of the economy--and given the number of anti-trust suits Google is embroiled in, I think the governments of the world know it. That said, Google generally seems to at least try to do the right thing, even if no one there seems to know exactly what that is.
> We desperately need to find a globally adoptable alternative to google and the services that it provides
I'm pretty sure Facebook and Twitter aren't far behind in the pursuit of also actively banning content they deem misleading. I don't think it's a Google-specific problem.
> We should be able to implement services like these
Implementation would be easy if we knew how to solve payments for decentralized hosting, maybe with ads as a possible business model. And the payments brokers mustn't be the central points either.
As always, the question is who's going to do better? The Americans already gave it their best shot and this is where they ended up. Certainly not any of the members of the EU, it'd get hobbled by regulation as they've never cared about actual free speech of the kind the Americans value. It's sure not going to be coming out of anywhere in SEA or NAME with the way governments in those regions tend to operate. So who's left to do better at a scale that matters?
I guess you can be somewhat brave here knowing that you can get a new job in about 5 minutes. You might want to consider making a principled stand here, though.
Tools like Skiff[https://www.skiff.org/] are on the path of being that "alternative" which is, quoting from their website "..a privacy-first collaboration platform with expiring links, secure workspaces, and password protection."
Don't quit, organize with other google workers to fight against the policies you disagree with from within until they fire you, then take a fat unemployment check until you find your next gig - somewhere hopefully with fewer moral compromises.
They don't want BS that is harming everyone on their property.
I would ban the same on my property.
That said, there is no reason to ever use Google. Nothing they offer is so critical that you must use them.
I don't use Google for anything and never will because they are a spyware company.
You willingly work for a spyware company and are trying to claim personal morals? How does that work in your mind? Genuinely curious.
> We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information.
How does that work?
Who pays for it?
Who manages it?
You realize that would create a de facto government if an actual government wasn't running it.
Look at any website that has truly "free-flowing information".
They all end up being a cesspool filled with racists, sovcits, terrorists, and pedophiles.
Even places like Kiwifams has rules and deletes posts and bans users that violates their few rules.
I think Urbit’s first principles approach to this is really interesting.
They’re the only ones I’ve seen that seem to have hit on a reasonable trade off to fix the common issues around federated services (simple administration, keeping versions in sync, first class network between users etc.)
The functional OS design is really cool too - I think it has potential to solve a lot of these issues.
I don’t really care that Google is removing dumb content from their services, but I agree that computing can be a lot more than it is. Users have lost ownership over their own compute. We have PCs, but everything is in the browser on someone else’s servers. Urbit is cool because it’s a way to get that ownership back.
We need and will (and also do) have other alternatives. But as soon as it grows big enough to get public attention, censorship will come. Cause majority wants that.
Almost no one in this industry is actually making the world better. Just take the money and use that to make the world better if you can. Especially since all things considered your role at Google probably doesn’t make things better or worse either way.
I think what we need is a users bill or rights. There should be certain rules a company just can't decide to make, and there should be certain rights afforded to every user.
Without that we're just choosing between which monarchy to rule us.
These alternatives exist though, they are just not popular. We can’t very well force people to adopt these alternatives to make them “global”.
It’s also not clear to me what these alternatives should do differently. Should they just host anything as long as it’s not illegal? I just read an article today about how social media is killing people by spreading vaccine misinformation. So they’re going to get pressured anyways, just from a different source.
So happy we have companies like Google doing moral arbitration versus companies like Walmart/Newscorp doing this. Wait till round two of Idiocracy capitalism, we will miss these days.
The toxicity on HN is a strange combination of vitriol and superiority complex. I can't really think of many other forums that spew such hatred while morally grandstanding to such an extent.
> Google's increasing role as an arbiter of right vs wrong and a steward of information
That is exactly what's needed.
When there's no penalty for bullshit, lies tend to self-perpetuate, like viruses.
You may be fixated right now on some half-baked ideal of "free speech" and so on, but the fact is - a lot of people out there can't tell left from right. And in situations such as the current pandemic, when the consequences of spreading bullshit are thousands of deaths, your naive ideas about "freedom" need a reality check.
> truly free-flowing information
Which will then immediately get hijacked by bullshit-spewing AI bots and folks with agendas. See what happened recently with all the "freedom" emphasizing social networks.
What you're proposing is the online equivalent of a country with no military, no police, no laws and no judicial system. This may be fine in some Ayn Rand fanfic novel for young adults, but it's not a reality where anyone would want to live.
The “public square” is free for speaking because it belongs to everybody.
As long as a speech is said in a private place (e.gr. Google’s servers, facebook’s…) it is subject to money. It will never be free because it is not “public”.
Google, Facebook, Twitter have positioned themselves to be the de-facto public square by buying up their competition and making themselves effectively the only game in town for what they do.
All these services are easy to replace. What isn't yet available elsewhere is the content discovery possibilities provided by Youtube, especially what would be considered "pirated" content on other sites without deep ties to the government (e.g. full CDs, movies that get uploaded and stay on yt for a long time, to be downloaded by millions).
"All these services are easy to replace" - I would like to agree, but I think that statement trivializes the endeavor a bit too much.
For Docs for example: Sure, from a technical standpoint, creating a webapp that lets you modify a document, syncs over new changes on a regular basis, and lets multiple users collaborate on the same doc and the same time is certainly harder than making a hello world calculator, but it's definitely not that hard. Most of us could figure out how to do it, especially since it's 2021 and our hardware is up to the task.
However, what is stupidly non-easy, is getting billions of people to use your solution, and for it to become the "standard" in society, for powerusers and non-powerusers alike, and for it not to have hiccups when a billion people use it. Oh, also, you need to somehow pay for the physical infrastructure that supports it, and the human beings that maintain it (hardware + software).
The situation would be even more complicated for YouTube because of the nature of the content, i.e. a single video on YouTube might be viewed by billions of people, while even the most popular docs are viewed by thousands at most, and even then making a copy of a text document to then distribute off-platform is pretty trivial.
And yes, we can spit out terms like blockchain w/ proof of stake, IPFS, etc. - but the tech isn't even the hard part, it's everything else that's hard (adoption, consensus, complexity for non-powerusers, funding, etc.)
What has to be "standard"? The application itself or its UX? I'm pretty sure it's the latter, so all it takes is a familiar UI and low-friction approach. You don't have to be a world famous brand for people to be able to use it.
Exactly. We only need a "standard" because everyone builds walled gardens and easy content distribution to multiple platforms is intentionally difficult. Right now you have to watch a "YouTube" video, instead of just a video on YouTube.
Standards != centralization. Standards apply more to protocols, and centralization applies more to ownership of data.
For instance, there is an enormous benefit to the entire world from using a standard IP/TCP stack. Yet, we don't seem to suffer from a centralized authority making controversial or conflict-of-interest decisions regarding that stack.
So what I was suggesting is that document-editing abide by some global protocol/standard, which would include storage, versioning, and permissions. As far as the choice of user-facing interfaces and implementations of logic around those standards, there need not be just one, or even a few. Everyone can bring something cool to the table and anyone can use whichever flavor they wish.
To avoid Google Drive/Docs/etc you don't have to boil the ocean. Buy a Synology DiskStation and just use the included software
It's a solution that works for anyone with basic IT skills. Offer your extended family access, and use the provided software to control permissions etc
Also, non-powerusers will gravitate towards the simplest solution to their problem, and that will also tend to be the one that the highest number of people understand how to use.
Deep ties to the government alone won't do it. You'll need deep ties to these content industries, and that will cost you money. Google has it. Most startups probably won't.
Point is Google can offer services like Docs for free and still invest money in continually improving them because it sells advertisement-space on its free products.
Sure you could build your own. But how would you finance the maintenance of your software and its free-for-customers delivery platform? Answer: By either selling advertisement, or by charging people for using it.
The problem really is that by now Google has monopoly. Therefore it is difficult or impossible for you to compete with them.
As a user, I don't need to compete with Google. I just need an alternative. If I needed collaborative document editing (as a replacement for Docs, a feature I don't use), I'd probably try something like https://www.samepage.io/ . My only use of Docs at the moment is for maintaining some stock price calculations and tracking with the =GOOGLEFINANCE(...) function. There's probably some personal finance apps out there that do the same.
Funny enough, I arrived at the opposite conclusion during my tenure as SWE... Google wasn't taking responsibility for the wide sweep of its arms as the gorilla in the room, and was trying to stay neutral ("We just build services; expecting us to be responsible for them is like expecting fire not to burn") in a situation where they fundamentally can't.
Google is already non-neutral... they ban all sorts of content on search and comply with law in multiple countries. It's never a question of "Should Google be neutral," but instead "How neutral."
In theory they can... in reality something bad will happen, someone will have written about it in a google doc, and the narrative will read "...they had access, yet evil/neglectful Google did nothing!".
No. That appeal to some notion of free speech is bunk.
They can “stay neutral” by limiting the ability to share widely. Free speech doesn’t mean that you are entitled to a billboard, radio station, or global content delivery network.
By aligning global distribution with easy content marketing, Google, Facebook, etc created a monstrosity that encourages the worst content and systematically evicerates high quality content.
That fundamental lack of understanding by naive engineers drives a lot of the problems we have.
I'm afraid I don't follow. In what way does it differ?
> Are you saying all online content should be subject to censorship just because it can be accessed worldwide?
I'm saying no CDN is obligated to vend content in violation of its TOS. Content available at drive.google.com is quite different from content hosted at your-site.com: you control the content at the latter. It's your TOS to enforce there.
"A content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN), is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users." That accurately describes Drive's infrastructure. It has additional bidirectional support, but seamlessly transitions to unidirectional distributed broadcast if many people connect to the same file.
> We're talking about a file sharing service used for collaboration
That's one way to use it. Another way is to cheaply host content and then post the link to Facebook or Twitter. It seems Google is reserving the right to not support that use case.
> It would be like AT&T disconnecting calls
Private calls are a different model from a public & shared link. It's a bit more more like a television station cutting a live broadcast if the person on screen starts sweating a blue streak. Though that analogy is also not perfect... Hosted publicly-accessible documents are kind of their own thing. It's not regulated as a common carrier and it's also not a newspaper.
> That accurately describes Drive's infrastructure.
It accurately describes a piece of infrastructure that many (if not most major) services including drive use.
It does not describe drive, but it’s a moot point since there is nothing relevant about calling drive a CDN.
> Private calls are a different model from a public & shared link.
Not at all. There is nothing stopping a phone call being made to a radio station, or placed on speaker to an audience of multiple people. This is analogous to the use case of posting a link to Twitter or a Facebook group.
> There is nothing stopping a phone call being made to a radio station, or placed on speaker to an audience of multiple people. This is analogous to the use case of posting a link to Twitter or a Facebook group.
This is actually an excellent demonstration of why phone calls are a poor analogy for publicized Drive links: in the scenario that you describe, if the radio station has not gotten the consent of the caller to broadcast the call or the circumstances don't suggest the call will be broadcast (such as if someone calls the station's customer complaints line and that line is patched inappropriately into the broadcast circuits), in most states (and under FEC guidelines) the radio station could be held legally liable for violating the caller's privacy.
No such law exists for a Google drive document link.
Shared documents are their own thing and previous models don't really precisely fit them. There isn't really any precedent to say that Google's position here is wrong; arguments by analogy break down quickly. A Drive document can be used as a private scratch pad, a multi-user scratch space, or as a stored read-only piece of data intended for broad dissemination on a reliable content network; the technology doesn't distinguish the use cases, and Google applies more or less the same policies to all of them.
Can you provide a precedent for Google's position being wrong other than reasoning by analogy from other telecommunications infrastructure (which we already treat differently from Google Drive shared documents)?
[Edit: your comment changed after I posted mine]
Oh, if your primary concern is that Google reserves the right to get into private collaborations and modify access to those documents, that's something other than what I'm arguing. I'm personally ambivalent (their house and their rules... If you don't like the rules don't live in the house), but I can see why people would have more concern with that situation than the situation where they block wide-cast sharing via a view-only link.
> Can you provide a precedent for Google's position being wrong
You don’t need a legal precedent to determine what is wrong. You are making the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent here.
> Oh, if your primary concern is that Google reserves the right to get into private collaborations and modify access to those documents, that's something other than what I'm arguing.
They do, and ok.
> I'm personally ambivalent (their house and their rules... If you don't like the rules don't live in the house)
This is a sentiment that I generally agree with as life advice, but is a non-contribution to these kinds of discussion.
> but I can see why people would have more concern with that situation than the situation where they block wide-cast sharing via a view-only link.
There is no difference between a small scale collaboration and what you have chosen to label a ‘wide-cast’ link, other than how many people read the document.
That's not actually neutral; that's letting harmful content spread at the speed of Internet discourse. We already know, for example, that they aren't going to allow Google Docs to be used to wide-cast child pornography. They never have. It appears the only change is that they're adding new categories of misinformation to the "harmful content" list.
When you have a reach like Google, neutrality isn't an option. And their mission isn't neutrality anyway; it's "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Dangerous misinformation coming from a google dot com domain isn't useful.
My mind boggles that people have opinions like this. It is so anti-liberal. Every evil regime in history takes it upon itself to define and eliminate hateful content, using the contemporary unconscionable act to justify this evil.
To be a good liberal, Google has to decide if it's a publisher or platform. IF it's a publisher, then the hateful content is coming from them and they must take editorial control of google docs and whatnot. If they're a platform provider, then they get the same protections as telephone network operators and others from the actions of their users.
This current situation is the start of the road to tyranny.
>Every evil regime in history takes it upon itself to define and eliminate hateful content, using the contemporary unconscionable act to justify this evil.
>This current situation is the start of the road to tyranny.
I'm not a historian, but I can't think of many examples where an evil regime gained power by slowly "boiling the frog" and gradually eroding free speech rights.
Communist dictators typically seized power in a violent revolution spurred on by deliberate misinformation campaigns.
Many of the Middle-Eastern dictators seized power in a not-so violent revolution (at least, not violent enough to cause
a full-scale civil war) spurred on by deliberate misinformation campaigns.
The colonial powers maintained their grip on power by denying education to the natives, and when they left the dictators that took their place seized power by violence even in a Western legal framework.
Maybe the Nazis did this (I'm honestly not sure), and maybe Julius Caesar too? But this doesn't seem to be a set-in-stone, guaranteed way of seizing power.
CP is already illegal and google doesn’t need to arbitrate whether its illegal or not. Blocking CP is neutral and a basic.
It’s when google decides to block things that aren’t illegal that they get into the weeds, and companies framing opinions they disagree with as “Dangerous misinformation” is itself dangerous misinformation, and a net negative on society.
Google should not be arbitrating truth. They are not qualified, not capable, and not honest enough to do it, and they will never be.
I don’t know a single person in real life I would trust to censor what I can and can’t see, and I trust google much less than those people I actually know.
It's funny to me that , in my mind HN = SV and SV is hyper liberal and listening to NPR which is also fairly liberal all the shows I listen to are calling for exactly "Google and Facebook need to ban all speech we don't like"
this isn't Google's problem. It's a society level problem. Google is just responding to the pressure
Modern liberal is generally fairly pro-censorship; pro-authoritarian. The word's definition has just flipped in recent years, so it means different things to different people.
Google doesn’t want to eliminate its cash cow, and doesn’t want to be associated with crazy fringe people. It’s pretty simple really.
Running this stuff through a “liberal” or “conservative” lens isn’t productive. Big public companies care about making money and eliminating risks associated with doing so.
I think you underestimate the desire of people to conform, to push their political agenda through their work, etc.
Big companies aren't at risk from losing money for quashing unpopular speech - it's exactly why unpopular speech is the speech that generally needs protecting.
That's narrative not reality. There's plenty of blowback but that's why it's important to protect unpopular speech. Its why the ADL argued the nazis should be able to march in milwaukee. Because when you create a mechanism to censor and restrict you have to know that it can be turned against any speech those in control find they don't like.
Are nazis marching near the homes of holocaust survivors disgusting? Sure. But there's a reason why it should be allowed if you and your children and their children are going to experience fundamental freedom instead of the arbitrary wishes of a government that may replace this one or the next one or the next one.
Sadly today we live on a world where the town square is digital but he government has failed to declare it common carrier. That is a failing of society and a reason just a few people can control the speech of billions.
You are technically correct based on current legal precedent but only because of the government's failure to regulate these companies not because it's inherently so.
If Milwaukee had been a company town they would still have been required to allow it, but because of weak politicians failing to ensure free speech is preserved we have arrived at a point where Mark Zuckerberg or Google's trust and safety team can arbitrarily ban speech for billions without any consequence or legal challenge.
Meanwhile just the other day the white House spokesperson was asking why if someone is banned on one platform they aren't banned on all of them automatically. If you don't see this dystopian future just over the hill you never will until it's too late.
To reframe, perhaps we live in a society where anyone who wants to can join the town square by putting up their own website, but almost everyone would much rather hang out in the hotel lobbies of Facebook, Google, and Twitter because the amenities are much nicer and those companies hand out free megaphones (in the form of interest-surfacing algorithms).
Is it "censorship" when they simply choose not to be the medium to communicate that data to you?
If so, that puts the entire search apparatus in the category of "censorship," since it makes opinionated decisions regarding what the answer to your query should be. Choosing to refrain from vending a Drive URL is basically the same thing.
Edit: I could see an argument that they're being a bad steward of other people's data if they choose not to honor share requests on content they host or choose to remove content they've previously hosted. In which case, I'm glad they're putting the fact they'll do that right in a public disclosure, and it is something people should consider when choosing Drive to host their content.
The search apparatus is exactly the target of those trying to implement censorship.
Six months ago saying covid-19 originated in a lab was verboten on many platforms - saying it on facebook or YouTube would get you called a purveyor of misinformation and the content deleted and and your account at risk.
Suddenly it turns out the people involved at the government level funded the work exactly, and they worked with these companies to define what was misinformation, and suddenly Jon Stewart is making jokes about it and these companies allow it to be talked about again.
If you don’t understand how dangerous the platforms that house our public speech banning some speech based on “misinformation” is you aren’t paying any attention. They have set up their systems to detect/downrank/remove arbitrary content and that will be used for political reasons - it already has been and quite recently.
We live in dangerous times and a lot of people are oblivious.
