I don't really know much about US politics, but could this recent attack on Facebook be a political move and a power grab? Attack FB so they block certain groups / certain topics and promote what the regulators want? I listened to the whistle-blower's testimony and I didn't hear any reasonable solutions (in my opinion at least; I am a software developer myself).
Also, it seems there might be some regulations imposed. Doesn't Facebook actually want that? More regulations = more difficult to implement a new competing service.
A lot of people in this thread are casting political attacks on Facebook as a Democratic thing, so I'll just point out that conservative Republican Senator Josh Hawley has been attacking Facebook for years, including proposals to strip them of Section 230 protection and to allow people to sue them in federal court for "harmful content".
The difference from what I see is that Republicans are attacking Facebook for censoring too much, while Democrats are attacking Facebook for censoring too little.
Only because of the nature of the censored content; Republicans aren't inherently as anti-censorship as the libertarian wing would like to hope they are. Social media are the fourth-and-a-half estate, and they're flexing their muscles for the other party.
> Their base is very adamant about the Bill of Rights.
Bullshit. A lot of their base is adamant about quoting the bill of rights when it serves them and looking the other way when it doesn't. Highly doubt most of them can even list all the amendments of the bill of rights they claim to be so passionate about. There's amendments in there about due process, yet you'll see the right defend cops using excessive force on people they arrest even if it ends in death. That's effectively a death sentence without a trial.
As far as speech, the right's embrace of "free speech" is recent and superficial. It wasn't so long ago that conservative groups in this country were trying to ban portrayals of gay people on mass media, with the same "think of the children" excuse that another comment on this thread was complaining about. That has only receded because they lost that culture war, but I'm sure they would gladly erase LGBT folks from popular culture if they could.
Marco Rubio just proposed a bill to stop corporations from being too "woke"[1]. There are also numerous instances of Republican politicians complaining or proposing bills about things like athletes kneeling during the anthem, burning of the flag, or other forms of expressions they deem "un-American". That's not even mentioning the Republican obsession with controlling "obscenity" on TV and other public media.
I'm not defending anything. I'm responding to your statement that Republicans don't want to censor speech.
> I haven't seen any calls from any Republicans to censor any speech.
They very clearly do! Even setting aside the Rubio bill, you did not respond to either the "you must be patriotic"[1][2] or the "obscenity"[3][4] type of censorship that Republicans love to pursue.
1. The big reveal in that article is "No we're not ready to do that yet". Legally yes it may be a freedom of speech issue because it's at a public university, but who wants political stunts at a game. The audience doesn't, no real debate is happening. Not the same scale as political dissent censorship.
2. Sorry can't view due to paywall, couldn't find an archive
3. You can be arrested in many liberal towns for public indecency. I don't support evangelicals argument against pornography using obscenity but it's not exactly a great comparison against the censorship of political dissent.
4. Same point as above.
Note that the main difference of these events are the severity and scale. It's many national level Democrats coordinating to censor political speech on a private platform by creating a fake "whistleblower" vs some kneeling at a basketball game or porn laws.
I agree that those few Republicans are wrong, but their suggestions aren't the majority in the party and they won't get far. Conversely, the Democrat party as a whole is currently and successfully crafting a censorship campaign.
> but who wants political stunts at a game. The audience doesn't, no real debate is happening. Not the same scale as political dissent censorship.
"No one wants to hear the things that the people I disagree with say, so laws preventing them from saying those things aren't really censorship."
> not exactly a great comparison against the censorship of political dissent.
"The things my opponents say aren't as important as the things I want to say, so censoring me is worse than censoring them."
> but their suggestions aren't the majority in the party and they won't get far. Conversely, the Democrat party as a whole is currently and successfully crafting a censorship campaign.
"My side always loses and the other side is evil and always gets their way, so even if there are dark instincts on my side we should be worried more about the other side."
> "No one wants to hear the things that the people I disagree with say, so laws preventing them from saying those things aren't really censorship."
There's a difference between protesting at a town square and kneeling at a paid game. Again I don't really support what these state senators are doing (though they said they WEREN'T going to btw, so what are we talking about?)
> "The things my opponents say aren't as important as the things I want to say, so censoring me is worse than censoring them."
Being able to jack off to a certain site online vs shutting down political dissenters can be compared and I can find one more important than the other. That being said, I don't support porn laws and it represents a minority in the party. Evangelicals have a lot less power these days.
> "My side always loses and the other side is evil and always gets their way, so even if there are dark instincts on my side we should be worried more about the other side."
That's not what I said. I said they aren't the majority, EVEN IN THEIR OWN PARTY. Yes some evangelical R's do cross the line with the puritan crap, that doesn't represent the majority nor can it be COMPARED TO SHUTTING DOWN POLITICAL DISSENT.
I don't think that's enough signal to disambiguate "coordinate use of a 'fake whistleblower' against Facebook" from simple fortune. Some members of the Democratic party want to rein in Facebook and other big-tech companies; of that I have no doubt. But "big tech" in general has been shedding whistle-blowers for years now as individuals find their consciences no longer let them play the game... My 'common sense' tells me if it weren't Frances Haugen, it'd have been someone else.
I'm thinking more of the Satanism scares of the 80s. Republicans have never really had the mass-media on their side post-Watergate (except maybe briefly after 9/11), so they can't silence anyone in the "fortifying the election" sense.
I think HN needs a thread dedicated to exploring the word "censor". If you think it means "any deletion of content" then I support some forms of censorship.
If you think it means "the prohibition of the possession of thought or the ability to transmit that thought via your own mechanisms", then I am against it.
I don't think we should tell HN or Facebook they must host content they know to be false and contributory to the decline of the nation.
You have to draw the line somewhere on when speech is defended, and when owners of sites or infrastructure should be legally and morally required to host content they don't support.
My line is at the ISP/DNS level. Let people build their own sites to publish whatever they want, and regulate ISPs and registrars as quasi-public utilities with certain societal obligations.
I don't think that obligation should extend to individual websites.
While you guys are talking about censorship, I just realize how many comments in the thread have been in effect partially "censored" on HN with lighter and lighter font color...
Your very first link is Hawley sending a letter because Facebook censored a Hunter Ukraine story.
Republicans are pissed because of the censorship (the big ones being lab leak and Hunter Biden's laptop, but there are smaller things all the time, 15 days bans for sharing a story the narrative doesn't agree with).
There's a good argument to make if FB wants to act like the arbiter of truth, the "truth" they choose should be legally liable.
Democrats are pissed because FB doesn't go far enough or something. They want ALL conservative media off the site.
Democrats want to amplify that censorship, Republicans don't want any censorship. Who is on the right side?
One fundamental precept of rational thought is that arguments speak for themselves. Claims exist independently of their speakers. You can't rebut an argument by suggesting that the person who made the argument has "chosen sides" or has any other characteristic whatsoever. You have to address the content of the argument itself. The human is irrelevant.
Everyone should read Greenwald's article. He makes a good case.
I can't imagine that the people downvoting this comment would do so if they saw it in a politically neutral context. It's completely uncontroversial in what it said: arguments can be evaluated without regard to who is making them. This is middle-school citizenship class stuff.
As long as it's me that gets to determine what is "biased" and what is not, sign me up. I also have thoughts about what is a "real" religion and what isn't, if you need more help.
I think he jumped his own shark a while ago when he left The Intercept [1] and has been writing some articles that sound reasonable but then veer into BS pretty quickly.
"And that is Facebook's only real political problem: not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the entire executive branch and both houses of Congress."
This is just fringe, nutty stuff. The media is indeed doing what he says they are nut they are doing it because that is what they always do when they have a story they want to be a part of to try to feed off the popularity.
It is insidious and messed up in almost exactly the reasons he mentions but not for the reasons he thinks.
> The media is indeed doing what he says they are nut they are doing it because that is what they always do when they have a story they want to be a part of to try to feed off the popularity.
Ah, they're doing it because they're doing it. Why didn't he think of this?
I think @pixelgeek means that politicians will always bandwagon a story that has momentum in order to maximize its utility.
It sounds like they are challenging Greenwald's narrative that Democrats are doing this explicitly to silence opponents, but that they have good faith issues with the willful amplification of disinformation on FB.
> Ah, they're doing it because they're doing it. Why didn't he think of this?
No, the media does this so you don't need to come up with an ulterior motive to explain it. They see a story and they want to get a part of it to get eyeballs on their shows/magazines/podcasts.
The difference here is that a Democratic leadership is more likely to take an adversarial approach to its relations to Facebook and companies like it than a Republican leadership would. (Trump being banned from all the platforms forms an outlier to this)
Further to that...
Manufacturing Consent [1] in 1988 formed a pretty solid argument that what the media does is not support a side as much as it supports the status quo. Media moves to support whomever is in power. Trump obviously blew the hell out of that but you can go back and look at critiques of Bush, Reagan, Obama and other presidents to see that media will criticize the current leadership but (again excluding the Trump outlier) won't take an adversarial role too far since it needs to maintain its relationship with those in power to continue to get content to publish.
This is one of the main reasons why I think right-wing leadership made such a big deal of getting the Fairness Doctrine repealed under Reagan. It lead to the development of media that didn't rely on having a symbiotic relationship with whomever was in power and could instead push a single doctrine with its broadcasting.
Not all Conservatives in the US believe that the repeal was a good thing [2] but for the folks like the Koch brothers it was a prime focus and it has paid dividends to them.
I understand and am quite sympathetic to his argument, but Greenwald and many other posters here are ignoring the known fact that foreign actors are using Facebook at scale to sow division and misinformation throughout the US and other countries.
Its US politics so it means nothing will be done and its just a chance for politicians to grandstand in front of an audience and pretend to be lecturing the big bad tech company. Its just theater.
Stratechery makes a pretty solid argument that the calls for regulating "fake news" in general and Facebook in particular is a Democratic reaction to getting outfoxed by Trump's use of social media in 2016:
Do you think the Democratic Party will ever admit that they lost in 2016 not because of "misinformation" or "fake news" or Russian interference or any of the other nefarious conspiracy theories they've promulgated, but because they put forward a terrible, unlikable candidate whom no-one was enthusiastic about and who offered nothing but sanctimony and a continuation of the failing status quo? Maybe it's not Facebook's fault?
That's basically what the Stratechery story above argues as well, but the key is that makes Facebook a convenient whipping boy that both sides can hate.
The left has blamed the election of Trump on Facebook, chiefly for spreading "misinformation".
Facebook should have responded to this charge by asserting they are not arbiters of truth, but they happily took up that mantle.
But it's not enough, and it never will be. The goal is to regulate Facebook into oblivion.
Others may disagree with my assessment of motivation. Plenty other "reasons" exist, all revolving around the specter of "misinformation". See for yourself, the recent bad press about negative impact on children is just the cherry on top.
All of this falls when the standard is personal responsibility. You should decide what is trustworthy, or misleading. You should decide how much time you (and your children) spend on social media.
But the going mantra is that this freedom is "harmful", and must be regulated. That's the end game, and your assessment is dead on.
No, the goal is to regulate Facebook so that the Democratic party controls what you are and aren't allowed to see on Facebook. It's entirely about power and control and anything else is just lies and distortion.
Also, it seems there might be some regulations imposed. Doesn't Facebook actually want that? More regulations = more difficult to implement a new competing service.