This is really a story about a celebrity's mental illness and public breakdown. If you haven't been following the news, West has spent the week saying increasingly unhinged things, not just about politics but about Pete Davidson, his wife, and (if I'm remembering right) his kids and the fake actor children that have been installed in his former home to corrupt them. He was interviewed for a show on Fox and a big chunk of what he said was edited out and later leaked; the "people at the Gap" knew about Uvalde, Kanye is now a Black Hebrew Israelite, &c. He's quite evidently sick, and these Parler people are scamming him.
It's sad because to become successful Kanye had to ignore hundreds/thousands of important people telling him he wasnt good enough and he would never make it as a rapper. Then he became, arguably, the most popular rapper/hip hop artist of all time.
Now image you've done what seems impossible despite countless people telling you it wont work out. You are in the top 1% of fame. Now someone tells you your other ideas are wrong. And that you cant actually achieve x goal. And that you don't know what you are talking about when you talk about y. And that you are sick and need to take meds to fix yourself.
Would you believe them? Or would you believe yourself?
I think Kanye is sick and needs help but I can see almost anyone falling into the exact same trap hes fallen into if they lived his life.
> but I can see almost anyone falling into the exact same trap hes fallen into if they lived his life.
Kanye is a garden variety manic-depressive. It has likely been exacerbated by stress and self-medicating with the wrong drugs, causing instability, paranoia and delusion. Bipolar disorder is genetic, it doesn't develop due to no one being able to say "no" to them.
What you are describing, however, is one way that Narcissistic Personality Disorder can develop. Successful individuals are more at risk of NPD. One of the biggest issues is that NPD patients usually don't suffer, so they rarely seek treatment, which can correct if not cure the disorder in under 2 years, rare among psychological disorders. But the symptoms of NPD not only include an exaggerated sense of self-importance, but also an inability or fear of criticism, and exceptionally strong denial. Narcissists don't listen to anyone, such as those that are trying to help them, yet they require constant admiration.
It is likely West has one of the more benign flavors of NPD, at least, I haven't heard he is violent nor of reports of him berating and belittling others (though I do not follow celebrities). I think his biggest problem is BPD and drug abuse (though the self-medication may be keeping him alive, it is far less than an ideal solution), but due to the combination with NPD and vast wealth, and probably being surrounded by those that will never deny him his insane impulses, he's probably not going to get help until he bottoms out in clinical major depression for months, if he survives it. BPD must be maintained, and if it isn't, inevitably the train leaves the rails.
This is word salad. A bunch of psycho-babel that gives the impression of a deep understanding of the human psyche when in reality it shows at best the ability to memorize the criteria around a few invented categories and give a horoscope based off of them.
I wouldn't make a point of saying this on other topics but it's crazy how much damage this stuff causes to people's lives
Vagueness fallacy as well as as hominem argument. If you disagree with what I've said, you must specifically speak to it. Handwaving and attacking me personally will never be persuasive.
Do you apply this same stict framework to your medical diagnoses you are handing out for people you've never met over the internet?
I don't need to catalogue the fallacies to point out why this is not a good idea.
This is also ironically vague and there is literally no ad hominem in there. Word salad is critique of the quality of the discourse, not of the person making it.
>> that gives the impression of a deep understanding of the human psyche when in reality it shows at best the ability to memorize the criteria around a few invented categories and give a horoscope based off of them.
This is ad hominem. You are ignoring what is said and making a personal attack. That is what ad hominem is, ignoring the argument and attacking the man.
> Do you apply this...
This is ad hominem.
> I don't need to catalogue the fallacies to point out why this is not a good idea.
You seem to be confusing disagreements with ad-hominem.
Here's an example of real ad-hominem: "You are an obnoxious narcissistic piece of shit that thinks every disagreement is a personal insult because you can't stand not being right". If someone was to use that sentence in an argument, that would be ad-hominem.
Asking whether or not you apply same standards of not using logical fallacies (from your original comment, I personally doubt it) is not ad-hominem because it's calling you out on asymmetric standards - apparently, you're free to commit logical fallacies as much as you want, but the moment someone else does, you halt all discussion and just shout "fallacy!" without any further elaboration and expect the other person to do the legwork of analysing how and why is the argument fallacious and fix it. That's not good faith discussion.
I'm abandoning this conversation because you seem unwilling to respond to the point of my post and bring any kind of argument to the table that isn't "fallacy!".
Ad hominem and invincible ignorance. Who says what never matters, it is what is said that is the province of valid argument. I have made no unsupported assertions regarding the truth values of fallacious responses to my initial argument, only identified these responses as specific fallacies to justify not responding. Thus, I have not made any appeal to fallacy, leaving the accusation(s) of such as straw man arguments. I would be more than happy to entertain valid argument, but none have been made in this thread in response to my OP in preference to attempts to humiliate, ostracize and bully me. Any scrutiny whatsoever of me is fallacious argument.
I agree with you. There was no attempt to engage the material of your original post. It was classified as psycho-babble from the outset and thus engaging it seriously would nullify that classification.
There was no attempt to engage with the material of the original post, because the original post contains no material, just various claims pulled out of thin air:
> Kanye is a garden variety manic-depressive
> It is likely West has one of the more benign flavors of NPD
> I think his biggest problem is BPD and drug abuse
The rest of the post is either true-sounding-at-first, but completely meaningless claims, or completely obvious things that provide no insight whatsoever.
> NPD patients usually don't suffer
Completely false. Narcissistic injury is extremely painful, and one of the reasons narcissists lash out in the first place.
> [NPD treatment can] correct if not cure the disorder in under 2 years
Also not true. Narcissism is a personality disorder, and "curing" narcissism in 2 years is not common. Everything "can" be done, theoretically, but the implications of the sentence is that Narcissism is somehow special in that regard. It's not.
> but due to the combination with NPD and vast wealth, and probably being surrounded by those that will never deny him his insane impulses, he's probably not going to get help until he bottoms out in clinical major depression for months, if he survives it
So assuming he's NPD, his wealth and sycophants will lead him to destruction? Yeah, quite profound. He also has clinical major depression? Where did that come from?
"Psycho-babble" is a perfectly appropriate description of the original comment.
I think the basic assumption is that you are diagnosing someone that you do not know and have never met, and that by doing so, you are engaging in folly.
(Retracting my comment. Kanye West has publicly talked about having bipolar disorder, see link below. Thank you to toomuchtodo for digging up that reference!)
> Kanye, who is now legally known by his nickname, Ye, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after being hospitalized for a psychiatric emergency in 2016. In the years since, he’s spoken about experiencing manic episodes, often tweeting and performing through them. He has famously referred to bipolar disorder as his “superpower,” and spoke candidly about the stigma around mental illness on David Letterman’s show in 2019. “I ramp up, I go high,” he said of his episodes, describing feelings of paranoia and delusions, as well as being handcuffed, drugged, and hospitalized.
In general, mental illness should be kept jealously private and only discussed with one's therapist, but this is in regards to the patient protecting themselves. Kanye can do what he wants, but if he is glorifying BPD (I have no idea), then he is indulging in his symptoms and heading towards cautionary tale rather than being a positive role model for other BPD patients and an advocate or activist for mental health, such as Patty Duke, Carrie Fisher, Catherine Zeta Jones, Trevor Noah, and many other celebrities. Life is hard for the mentally ill, and though I'm sure a couple billion dollars can make a huge difference, most BPD patients will end up institutionalized, in prison, or dead repeating Kenye's mistakes.
I'm not saying monetizing one's own mental illness is necessarily wrong, and I think many have been successful throughout history doing so, especially in art, without causing harm. But living in the spotlight, whether intentionally or not, one should, like Spider-Man, recognize there is great responsibility, and take the positive and negative effect it has on others seriously. Again, I don't know what Kenye is doing, only getting glimpses from headlines I can't avoid.
Incorrect. There is no single cure for personality disorders, but that doesn't mean they can't be cured. Any mental illness that is not genetic and which develops due to external causes can be cured. There are many personality disorders, of which NPD is one. While there is no single cure for NPD, in fact NPD can be cured in many cases in one of two ways. Some can be cured relatively quickly with an antidepressant, which eliminates the symptoms, but most with NPD can either mitigate the disorder or completely cure it though talk therapy generally in under two years. It's absolutely true that one can learn to stop being an asshole.
Both you and parent are likely incorrect. The truth is, curability depends on a number of things which we currently lack the correct insight and models to correctly analyze. It's likely case-by-case, and ad-hoc, based on the extremely complex history of the individual.
But most importantly, we don't know, so making broad, absolutist claims is a waste of time.
Personality disorders can be treated and managed, but not cured. Like PTSD, just because a disorder is caused by external factors does not mean that it is reversible.
It is not. The question has been settled on a huge scale by historical events.
If illnesses like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia were meaningfully caused by genetic factors, then the Nazi genocide of mentally ill people would have caused a dramatic and lasting reduction in mental illness post-war among the affected population. It didn't.
You might also ask yourself, if something is genetic, shouldn't identical twins (preferably raised apart) both get it or both not get it? Obviously that situation is rare, but researchers do seek out and study instances.
Mental illness is a social phenomenon. There are lots of physical explanations for symptoms similar to psychosis - drugs, infection, immune disorders, chemotherapy, professional head trauma addict, but when nothing else clearly fits, "mentally ill" is the default, the end of the "switch" statement.
The social construction of the category is embodied by the admission process at a hospital's mental ward. They literally go down the various causes that they can check for a disordered mental state, and if they can't find anything else, that is mental illness, end of story. In fact, lots of abnormal blood tests may be ignored if they don't fit into an obvious pattern.
The meaning of the term is defined by what people with the power to assign it do. There is no abstract essence of it beyond the process as enacted.
It's a label that serves a critical function of allowing society to abandon difficult diagnoses and redirect resources to others permanently. It doesn't represent an illness, but the lack of understanding what it is. This is not at all the same as the (unknown) constituent disorders being unphysical or one single entity.
It's sort of like the "scientific creationists" that keep finding God in the gaps of science. There's always something left, but either you have faith in naturalistic explanations or not. If you aren't satisfied with science, you can't talk as though there is such a thing as scientific fact about the scientifically unknown, and implicitly lump it all together.
There are many contexts in healthcare where it's considered socially acceptable not to be strictly honest and accurate.
Psych drugs commonly say, or used to say, in the info leaflets something like they "correct imbalances of certain chemicals in the brain".
This is completely made up, and apart from the vagueness, obviously not reasonable when you consider that such drugs usually take a considerable amount of time to have their full effect.
But it's a customary "white lie" (or rather a fiction) to try to sooth patients and keep them confidently on meds. It's not a big secret, or a scandal, but an attempt to manipulate hopefully trusting people for their own good.
As another example of the dynamic, doctors treat patients who are inevitably going to die in the near future, and if they sense the patient is still holding out hope and still wants treatment, they will probably avoid accurately communicating the reality, the number of weeks or days left, and instead say things about progress and remission until the end.
I don't know what context "the gene" for bipolar disorder came up in, but could it possibly be that your family member was obsessed with "the gene" and the doctor humored them? You've heard of sugar pills?
> If illnesses like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia were meaningfully caused by genetic factors, then the Nazi genocide of mentally ill people would have caused a dramatic and lasting reduction in mental illness post-war among the affected population. It didn't.
Citation needed.
The population of Germany alone in 1940 was over 70M people. The Nazi's killed an estimated 230K disabled individuals, including the physically disabled and the mentally ill. That only accounts for 3 tenths of a percent of the population, but ~50% of any population will be diagnosed with a mental illness at some point in their lifetime, so their efforts were astoundingly insufficient from a mathematical perspective.
But whether someone is bipolar or not is not a simple trait like whether their earlobes are connected or whether they can roll their tongue. A massive genome study identified at least 64 regions of the genome that are associated with an increased risk of bipolar disorder. But even if it were a simple trait, there is such thing as recessive traits, so the Nazi's agenda was, of course, totally insane and could never be successful from a genetic perspective.
Schizophrenia tends to run in families, but no single gene is thought to be responsible. Bipolar disorder is the most likely psychiatric disorder to be passed down genetically. If one parent has bipolar disorder, there's a 10% chance that their child will develop the illness.
I read (ok, skimmed) an academic study that attempted to compare post-war populations with different histories, and failed to find evidence of an effect; if anything the reverse.
I dislike your sophistry about 50% of the population being mentally ill, as if the victims were chosen from that portion at random. So, out of spite, I'm not going to search for the study and you are free to believe that it doesn't exist.
As someone who doesn't listen to much rap / hip hop, and can only name his cover (adaptation?) of Stronger, I do know who Kanye is. I don't know anything about his music. Mostly I just know of him because he's a very public asshole. Much like his wife.
I find it basically impossible to empathize with him. I just wouldn't ever be in that situation. "Rising against adversity" is not the story I'd be be using here so much as just a typical strongman bravado leading to an absolute disconnect from reality.
I would wager greatly that it's not that he's grown cynical to people saying he can't do something, but that he's become delusional from people telling him a genius. People who convince themselves that they're smart do this thing where they have an idea, and conclude that because they've come up with it and they're smart that it must be a well reasoned idea.
Early Kanye West brought a lot of attention to social issues through his music and was one of the first hip-hop artists to publicly advocate for acceptance of gay folks in hip-hop culture at a time when gay slurs were very common. His first album was downright wholesome as far as hip-hop and there's a reason he was so beloved.
He's been on a long, slow, downward trajectory with his mental health since the death of his mother and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be anybody looking out for him anymore. It's really sad to watch at this point.
This is an interview from 2005 where Kanye defended gay people when it wasn't exactly popular. Trigger warning for gay slurs.
> one of the first hip-hop artists to publicly advocate for acceptance of gay folks in hip-hop culture
That's interesting - I've listened to his music since the beginning and would've assumed the opposite based on his reaction to the South Park Fish Sticks episode. Is there a specific song/album/statement he made that shows support for the LGBT community? As he's turned deeply religious (supports mega churches) + conservative in recent years I'd further expect him to not support LGBT groups.
GP is simply offering some context since you said you don't know Kanye at all and have only encountered him recently. It was never intended to be incompatible.
But you also clearly have no idea who he is and what’s he’s stood for - the guy is single-handedly responsible for turning the tide on Gangster rap.
Here’s one way to put it:
No other man alive today is more responsible for changing negative to positive messages in popular music today.
He’s literally one of the most thoughtful and revolutionary artists alive. But of course you’d have to have listened to his albums from the start and followed along with interviews not just reading all the headlines on Reddit or Twitter.
And no, he hasn’t degraded. Ye, TLOP, Kids See Ghosts, Jesus is King are all massively successful unique pieces of art. It’s hard to compare him to anyone - MJ stayed within one genre, only really the Beatles maybe had as much diversity of novel styles.
If you only pay attention to the media you’d have your opinion. It’s so out of wack with reality though. But that’s what we have all across this entire forsaken thread - a bunch of totally naive people who aren’t even 1% familiar with his corpus of work or history calling him sick and worse.
> "Rising against adversity" is not the story I'd be be using here so much as just a typical strongman bravado leading to an absolute disconnect from reality.
It's not really a story of rising against adversity though. It's that people who have a lot of success doing something have trouble turning around and doing the opposite. There seems to be a human tendency to double down on what people think got them their success.
She's a no-talent clown who bought her way into the public view with nepotistic wealth. She heavily uses photoshop on her pictures, and then sells beauty products to insecure young women to profit off the insecurities her digital media team helped manufacture. Her brand is basically just 'stupid and rich' - not someone I'd ever want any of the young women I care about to idolize. Her fame is a shame of American society: her rise is emblematic of the shift, away from talent, to wealth being the primary factor in modern cultural prominence.
> She heavily uses photoshop on her pictures, and then sells beauty products to insecure young women to profit off the insecurities her digital media team helped manufacture.
This describes the whole "beauty" industry. I think this might be a case of "don't hate the player, hate the game". There are also plenty of other celebrities whose success amounts to appearing on some reality TV show and building an empire off of that. Kim Kardashian is not remarkable in this regard, but seems to get more hate than average.
I think the majority of beauty industry 'personalities' are assholes. Some are finding success without manufacturing insecurity though, so I don't think it has to be table stakes.
What is your point? Someone called her an asshole and then gave a reason. You don't like that reason but you say it's fine not to like her. Seems like a pointless conversation.
> and is apprenticing to become a lawyer in California
She's been working on that for nearly four years. And only just passed the 'baby bar' exam this year (The baby bar exam is the exam California gives -first year- law students. It requires a score of 70% to pass. Kardashian has taken four years, and four attempts, to pass the equivalent of the first year of law school).
Much as I hate to say it, those whose lives would be bettered by meaningful prison reform would probably get more out of her doing publicity and fundraising and using her celebrity status to that end, rather than becoming an attorney.
Though I was under the impression that her entire brand was showcased on a show where they went over the top being vain, petty, and brandishing the biggest ego's they could muster?
>I would wager greatly that it's not that he's grown cynical to people saying he can't do something, but that he's become delusional from people telling him a genius.
I've been wary of defending Kanye online lately, but Kanye's influence isn't just "rap / hip hop". Kanye also broke into luxury/high-end fashion quite unexpectedly where he was given the same sort of push back. It started with him interning at Fendi (when he already was one of the largest entertainers on the planet) alongside a group of other eclectic individuals (the other most notable one, Virgil Abloh, who would go on to become creative director of Louis Vuitton).
He captured lightning twice and I can't imagine that developing into a personality into anything other than "everyone else is wrong".
That said, I don't think he's become delusional from people telling him he's a "genius", or from mental illness. Since 2020, I've seen scores of people all fall into the internet misinformation pipeline and I don't think Kanye is any different - he just has the largest platform. He's no more mentally ill than your uncle who believed COVID was a hoax. Everything he is saying is currently "mainstream" conservative ideology, his talking points are lifted directly from Candace Owens who is employed by The Daily Wire, which is run by the most famous conservative personality, Ben Shapiro, (maybe after Tucker Carlson).
the secret here is that the emperor has no clothes, and Kanye's fashion garbage is equally as garbage as the rest of the high end fashion culture. It's not that kanye's that good, it's that its all a crock of dogfood with high end price tags and people who won't say anything trying to fit in for access to the wealthy.
I own a pair of DH Gate "Feezys" purchased for $40. They're comfy, stylish, and surprisingly durable. 3 years of semi regular wear and they're just getting to the point where they look ragged and shitty. I'm strongly considering ordering a new pair of knockoffs simply because they're just a well designed casual athletic shoe. Comparable to something like Vans, except they don't fall apart in 5 months.
I personally wouldn't pay $300+ for them. A lot of his fashion design has a similar utilitarian theme to it, and I believe that the intent with his partnership with GAP was to more or less have an outlet to offer his designs at a more affordable price. Although I could be mistaken.
(I acknowledge the fact that the price of my shoes is because of either some fraudulent factory manager skimming product and/or bad labor practices and that's a bit shitty of me. But they're simple shoes, there is certainly a very high markup on the authentic versions too.)
>Kanye's fashion garbage is equally as garbage as the rest of the high end fashion culture.
This is not something I agree with, I believe there is something like called good taste (http://www.paulgraham.com/goodtaste.html), and just because I don't care to understand it (just like I don't care to understand expensive cars or expensive watches), that doesn't mean the entire field is garbage.
just because good taste exists doesn't mean it exists in the luxury fashion industry or any particular location or time. Good taste exists but not there.
It's overpriced gaslighting dogfood at best, a meat market to gain access to the stupidly wealthy at worst.
Just because you don't understand an entire art-form and the industry attached to it, that doesn't make it all "garbage".
Might as well go on to say that all modern art or modern cuisine is garbage, and sound just as ridiculous while doing so.
Spoiler alert: weird artsy high-fashion pieces you see on runways are not expected to be sold or worn in real life. Just like visual design of concept cars isn't what's expected to actually drive on the roads.
Doesn't make it good either though. A lot of "modern" art was artists claiming that traditional lenses and standards held too much authority and fuck off. We're going to do draw squares and they're going to be cool. Challenging "what does it mean to be good". Cool.
A lot of "post modern" art is this idea that it doesn't matter what you think, fuck you, I made this thing and it may even feel purposefully bad, and if I say it's good, it's a valid perspective. Which is really just kind of a post truth drain on society if you ask me; and is a really toxic thing when it's driven by tribalism and mass media to claim "this is good because a lot of people are saying it's good".
High end fashion is not very approachable to most people. A lot of it is just speaking back and forth within a very insular community. Most of it is absurd from the get go. Good art should be evocative of something.
FWIW, Kanye's fashion to me seems like it wants me to call it bad. Dreary. Unattractive. Poor, but.. in a way that seems like its asking for victimization rather than express something about poverty.
Yup, whenever I hear that about fashion, for all the times I think that the GP's statement is accurate, there's also a Vetements story.
Their line, they want to champion a more "pragmatic" approach to fashion, and "down to earth nature", compared to the big fashion houses.
Demna Gvasalia and his friends all worked at LV, Balenciaga, Maison Margiela, etc.
Vetements in reality? "Down to earth" $1200 track pants, $800 t-shirts, $500 baseball caps, $1500 hoodies.
Given a choice between "trying to break down fashion to be more pragmatic, approachable and down to earth" and "we saw how much money the fashion houses made and we decided we wanted a bigger piece", I know which way I lean.
Edit: in a fit of irony, Balenciaga offered him the role of Creative Director and he went there.
For "every day" fashion, the game is given away by the cyclical nature of fashion trends. What's popular today is approximately what was popular 20 years ago. It's a game of maintaining constant demand for new stuff in an industry where almost all of the practical problems were solved a century ago.
High fashion is obviously a completely different beast. Something that has been pointed out to me recently is how "folk fashion" which focused on meticulous details like beading and cross-stitching was largely the pursuit of women, while modern "high fashion" that involves conceptual flourishes that are relatively simple to produce is more dominated by men. I'm not really sure what to make of this observation yet, but it is interesting.
The treatment of workers in both "every day" fashion and high fashion is deplorable as well and is hard to look past if you're trying to keep an open mind.
I think Kanye actually is more mentally ill than our misguided uncles. I believe he has even spoken about his struggles with it during more lucid times.
It’s odd how in my own personal experience, the only way that I know that Kanye is “the most successful rapper of all time” is people telling me that he is the most successful rapper of all time. I actually hardly ever hear his music, or see him performing anywhere, as compared to other rappers who, if I were to volunteer an opinion based on my own experiences I would think of as “most successful rappers of all time”, like Eminem, or Dre, or JayZ or even Snoop.
It’s almost as if his whole thing was to successfully market himself to be associated with the title of the “most successful rapper of all time”.
But I have to give him that other than such an illustrious title, I do hear of him in countless contexts other than music: his marriage, his shoes, his renaming himself, his presidential ambitions, his beefs with other actual artists, and now his purchase of 4chan.
He's literally one of the best selling music artists who single-handedly pioneered multiple substyles within hip-hop over a 20 year career. He's released some of the most critically acclaimed albums of all time.
Strictly as a rapper he might not be listed as "the best rapper ever", but as a musician he's easily up there.
His father was a photojournalist for the main newspaper in Atlanta and his mother was a Fulbright scholar. He grew up in a solid middle class suburb and he attended a magnet school for gifted kids before getting a scholarship to the American Acaedmy of Art. He started producing music for artists directly out of high school and was producing for Roc-A-Fella within 3 years of starting out in the music scene.
It was at Roc-A-Fella that he decided to be a rapper, and it took him all of 2 years to produce The College Dropout.
He lived an incredibly charmed life before he ever started rapping.
Kanye makes me think of someone I knew. I knew a young woman once whose conversation was impossible to follow. She was a college graduate, and seemed intelligent. But, I think either her mind wandered, or else she simply lacked the capacity to reliably establish context in conversation.
I assure you, I really tried to make sense of what she was saying to me. She was beautiful, and I was interested in her. (I say this to emphasize how hard I was trying to make sense of it all.) But, in the end, I just could not follow. Maybe she had a kind of ADHD. But my point is that her "mental illness" likely went no further than that.
I can't follow Kanye either—though I am far less motivated to do so, by comparison. But, the guy is successful. I'm tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt that, like the young lady in my story, he may know what it is he's saying.
To a lesser extent, I have found entertainment in speaking with people who start a topic with their thesis (i.e. why are there Yellow Pages and White Pages? So stupid!) To which you lightly counter with some easy to digest fact (i.e. yellow is biz, white is res), and then a few sentences later, they'll conclude with their original point, as if you said nothing at all (i.e. See? Isn't it stupid, yellow and white pages. Makes no sense!). It was frustrating before, but now it's enjoyable to see a person live in a different reality right in front of me.
Note: Sorry for dating myself and using a The Simpsons reference.
Interesting, because personality disorders run in my family (ADHD, ASD, schizophrenia, OCD, depression, anxiety, etc.) and as someone with two of those diagnosed (and likely a third undiagnosed), I tend to follow Ye's line of thought flawlessly.
On the other hand, I often have to speed-watch speeches and lectures, as most neurotypical people stay on the same topic far too long for me to stay attentive. By speed-watching, the subject changes frequently enough for my mind to never start wandering.
I don't know much about Kanye, but are reports of people telling him he didn'h have talent to be a rapper genuine, or just something he tells people? Because it sounds like the sort of thing people make up for their own personal narrative. It reminds me of when people say things like "the doctor told me I only had a year to live" - which is something no doctor would actually say because its a massive legal liability, but it fits our personal narrative. Who were these people Kanye had to overcome?
It was genuine. He worked hard to get good at making beats, to the point he got signed at Roc-a-Fella Records to make beats for big artists at the time (Jay-Z, Alicia Keys, etc). He was super known for that in the industry, but Kanye insisted on one specific term of the contract - they gotta let him release his own album. Which they hesitantly allowed, because they thought he was just gonna fail and go back to what they thought he was good at, making beats for other rappers.
They didnt want him to be a rapper, but not for some malicious reason. They loved his beats, but thought no one would care for his songs that were nothing like the mainstream rap at the time, especially since none of them were about bling/drugs/gang stuff. That's just what was selling. And Roc-a-Fella Records wanted their star beatmaker actually making beats for their star rappers, not "pursue dreams". So they allowed him to make that album, thinking the sooner he is done with it, the sooner he will get back to beatmaking.
All of this is confirmed by tons of other people affiliated with Roc-a-Fella Records (like Jay-Z and others) at the time.
I mean, it's the same story now that's been told since the time all of this was happening, and Kanye was indeed having issues with his first album getting even published. And it is also true that pretty much everyone expected his first album to flop.
Unless literally everything said about the matter by everyone involved was an extremely consistent lie that they all conspired to perfectly maintain for 20+ years and ongoing, I find it very difficult to agree with your statement.
The entertainment industry is built on fictional stories, his overarching theme is "victim". I'm sure the people that benefit from being associated with Kanye in even the slightest way are perfectly happy to support the narrative he tries to spin, they might even believe it.
Even among fans, early Kanye was never considered a great rapper (although he was always considered an elite producer). It always felt clear to me that he'd be around and doing big things in the music industry for many years, but I kinda assumed he'd be much more behind the scenes and focusing on production.
Parent commenter is reading too much into Kanye's first struggles to become a rapper in light of this Parler purchase. But parent commenter is right that no one saw Kanye as a rapper initially. Back then, Kanye was only known as a beatsmith and producer, not someone to actually be on the track.
Kanye has a song off his album College Graduation where he talks about his initial troubles[1]
This article is from 2011, but today on Spotify Eminem still has more monthly listeners than Kanye West (53M vs 51M). Eminem also has several songs that have over a billion streams (one with >1.5b), while Kanye has just one and it's at exactly 1b.
This discounts Kanye's production work as well and might discount many of his collaborations, but I expect Eminem to still have more listens on spotify.
However, in terms of influence on hip hop and pop music as a whole, I think Kanye is above Eminem and it's probably not close. Unfortunately, that's a lot harder to measure.
If we're talking overall influence, it's Dr. Dre and then everyone else can get far back in line.
Kanye likes to claim that his music wasn't about gangster rap and that's why he was sidelined for... a couple years... meanwhile, Dre not only made NWA and Snoop Dogg but managed to convince the entire rap world that a poor white kid with drug problems and abuse issues was the next huge thing by doing things that nobody had ever thought to do before.
Kanye’s 808 & Heartbreaks has been claimed by many rappers from the 2010’s and onwards to have been a major influence. He really went all in on autotune and introspective lyrics. I much prefer Dre but his influence is waning.
The specific claim was "the most popular rapper/hip hop artist of all time". For that claim, I don't see a good reason why the last decade should weigh more heavily than the decades before.
The first time I remember hearing about Kanye was on Jay-Z's Black Album, "Kanyeezy you do it again, you a genius", the criticism lobbed against him in the early aughts was that he was a brilliant producer, but not a rapper, and then College Dropout came out, and changed that. It's really a shame to see all of this, Kanye is one of my favorite musicians of all time.
This is a very dry comparison between the two, as it only looks at numbers. Is Nickelback has far better commercial success than Rage against the Machine, but I don't think most people would rate Nickelback higher than RATM. Stronger may be Kanye's best selling track, but it's his easily least influential.
From this perspective - my intuition is that the likelihood a Kanye West led Parler will be successful is substantially greater than that a rap career will be successful. In some sense West is moving on to more plausible investments as he gets older.
West has had success as an entertainer and as a businessman - I believe he has a successful shoe company. He's famous. If he thinks he can take on Parler, that seems like a crazy challenge but one he is well equipped to take on. I would certainly believe in myself - even if I thought it was low probability I'd feel certain that it was possible.
I don't know if I think it's likely he can make a success out of Parler. That's a very tall order. But I definitely think he's got a better shot at it than whoever has run it to date.
Completely agree. Put another way, it was far dumber for Parler's current founders and investors to try and create the Nth twitter clone in the current year than it is for Kanye to try and run it. Assuming he paid a reasonable price - buying Parler is probably faster, simpler, easier than creating your own app, which Kanye might not have the expertise/team to feel comfortable doing.
In 2006 I saw Kanye West perform at a music festival. This was while he was touring for his second album.
I got an early taste of his mental illness. He started maybe 5 songs, each of which he would cut short in the middle to rant about the sound being off. He was completely unhinged and rambling each time. After 20 minutes he simply walked off stage and that was that.
Ever since then, I've found that his illness has been very evident in the art itself. It precludes me from enjoying it, and there's been a number of times I've felt terribly sad seeing these signs celebrated by those who don't see the connection (which is not to suggest that they should).
All that said, I've never even considered this perspective, so thank you for sharing it. It makes a mountain of sense, and makes the whole situation that much sadder (and more complex).
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. This is a very sad, very public case of mental illness combined with the paradox of success. There's no way, healthy or not, that he wouldn't think he knows better than everyone else for exactly the reason you describe. Anyone in his position would be fighting back the naysayers. The major difference is that Kanye has had enough failures and stumbles now that his whole "god" and "GOAT" persona is publicly falling apart and he doesn't know how to handle it. The mental health issues are just exacerbating his inability to reconcile his personal ambitions with reality.
Just think about it... if you've been a success for so long and suddenly aren't, who would you blame? If you didn't say anyone but yourself, you're not Kanye.
It's almost as if there is something that happens once you have a major, incontestible success, that you come to believe that your victory had little to do with luck and more to do with destiny or some inherent quality that you possess, and therefore the one masterpiece is a shadow of what is to come.
I don't want to get off topic here, but talking about Kanye West as "arguably the most popular hip hop artist of all time" should also come with that argument attached to justify such a grandiose statement. I mean, I need to see some Claire Danes w/red yarn vibes to even begin to understand that position.
You can talk of Kanye and Swift in the same sentence (never had a struggle meal, I see your nick Taylor ;) ), but Kanye vs. Nas? Jay? J. Cole? Sheeet, even Em? I don't even know if there are metrics that could make that statement valid unless you restrict it to some weird "early 'aughts" sub-generation.
I challenge thee to numbers, graphs and beyond all - cultural import! <gauntlet slap>
But the interesting thing is that you can see how the rankings favor more recent people, with 80s and 90s artists also up there and with far longer careers, but eclipsed by the more recent people.
This is a great point. People become calcified and stuck in their ways as a survival mechanism! Times change and circumstances do too thus the axioms floating around in our heads deviate from "reality" like a lifeboat floating away while we pretend everything is normal. This is not only a lesson for the extreme rich - but everyone.
He's been delusionally egotistical for nearly two decades. I think he's always been a self centered asshole, the schtick was just more palatable when he was only talking about the trivialities of the music industry.
It’s interesting that you feel entitled to judge the mental health of a Black man who is probably at least two to three orders of magnitude more financially successful than you are.
At least try considering the possibility that his lived experience is valid.
He has also become quite tight with Candace Owens recently. She has been publicly supporting his persecution complex and appeared with him in the White Lives Matter t-shirt incident at the Paris Fashion Week event. I will give you two guesses who the CEO of Parler is married to...
Candace Owens - Wilks Bros funded figure head tasked with helping socially engineer a culture that removes taxes on the rich and feed contempt for real democracy.
> She has been publicly supporting his persecution complex
Ok.
> A Twitter rep told The Post on Sunday afternoon that West’s account “has been locked due to a violation of Twitter’s policies.”
> JP Morgan Chase may have notified West of its decision to end its banking relationship with him
> In a statement to CNN Business on Saturday, a Meta spokesperson said content from West’s account was deleted for violating the company’s policies and a restriction was placed on his account.
Doesn't sound like it is a complex if Twitter, Chase, and Meta/FB have all taken actions against him recently.
Dude's been blasting antisemitism on social media, in violation of long-standing, well-understood policies. Shutting down his accounts is the opposite of persecution.
> Dude's been blasting antisemitism on social media, in violation of long-standing, well-understood policies.
Can you give specific examples? I just looked this up because I was interested. This very long winded Vice article only seems to point out a few "antisemitic" statements he makes[0]. Here's the first two:
> Ye used a strange metaphor when talking about Black people judging one another, telling Carlson, “Think about us judging each other on how white we could talk would be like, you know, a Jewish person judging another Jewish person on how good they danced or something.”
I've never heard of people hating on Jews because they can't dance. If you watch the clip it sounds like Kanye is just trying to come up with an example, and it's clear he's not "blasting antisemitism" here.
> Ye added, “I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering.” (The belief that Jews control the financial system is one of the oldest and most deeply-rooted antisemitic claims...
Ah yes, the classic joke that Jews are rich. This has been a joke since forever, and maybe it's a bad thing. But Netflix is still playing Seinfeld reruns, and there's way more than one joke in there about rich Jews. There's even an entire episode poking fun at people taking offense to Jewish jokes[1]. And Twitter, Meta, etc aren't blocking Netflix. If joking that Jews are rich is antisemitism that's punishable by banishment from social media, these sites are not enforcing their standards fairly.
I don't really care about Kanye West, but I'm so sick of people claiming everybody is racist, bigoted, and homophobic just because they disagree with something. Show me where Kanye is advocating for the annihilation of the Jews before you go citing baseless claims. And if there is some clear antisemitic statements that I missed coming from Kanye, then I apologize in advance. But right now, it seems like this is just another "this person disagrees with me so let me find some vague statement they said and claim its racist/homophobic/bigoted speech".
First off, his name is Ye, and I actually like his music (though, let's be honest, Donda was never gonna live up to the hype). This isn't about me not liking the guy.
> Show me where Kanye is advocating for the annihilation of the Jews before you go citing baseless claims.
Now, I didn't say he's been advocating for the annihilation of Jewish people, I said "blasting antisemitism." Antisemitism exists on a spectrum, and advocating for the annihilation of Jewish people is one point very far along that spectrum. If that's your actual threshold, you're definitely going to miss a lot of dogwhistles. But he's gotten pretty alarmingly close to exactly that:
> I'm a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.
In case you're not familiar, defcon 3 is an elevated state of military readiness -- that the US hasn't seen since 9/11.
The recent Drink Champs podcast is a weird mix of legit anti-semitism (“Jewish media blackballed me”) and, for lack of a better phrase, “advice to black people that they should copy behaviors that made Jews successful”.
Stuff like investing in property and making sure your children have a career path lined up regardless of your personal success. His anecdote about Stevie Wonder’s kid being forced into a low end job to make ends meet is really sad if it’s true.
Thanks for the clarification. It doesn't help that Twitter has removed this, so all I can find are long winded articles about him saying this without actually showing it. This is clearly an antisemitic statement.
It would be helpful if the media didn't post every single thing he's said about Jewish people claiming it's antisemitism, because that just muddies the waters and makes people more apt to believe the media is just lying.
and these Parler people are scamming him - that's an interesting point I hadn't thought of. My first thought on hearing this news was so what? I don't care about Parler or Kanye West, but if Parler is taking advantage of Kanye's mental decline then that's next-level awful. Like I said, I'm no fan of Kanye, but that's horrible to take advantage of people like that.
I really wish people understood this more. Anecdotally, I'll never forget the time I was around him and some of his people. This when he was just coming up as a rapper but well known to be a producer. Just a little club appearance, and there was some odd technical issue.
I've never seen a human being who more obviously "sought the approval of others." He has this weird negative charisma; like there are some people who light up the room by being in it. It's not that he darkens the room -- but it's that he needs the light from others. It just felt like he needed everyone to really like him, and I could so easily see how someone could take advantage of that.
Glib, but I've heard it said that narcissism is a prerequisite for the job. What rational human actually believes that they are qualified to be the most powerful person on Earth?
That said, most presidents have had qualifications other than narcissism.
I think everywhere requires "capacity" to enter a contract, and Delaware does have this on the books:
> 6 DE Code § 2705 (2019): Any person who has attained 18 years of age shall have full capacity to contract; provided such person has not been declared legally incompetent to contract for reasons other than age. Any person who has attained the age of 18 years shall become fully responsible for that person’s own contracts.
So I'd presume it would come down to what Delaware's Court of Chancery expects for someone to be "declared legally incompetent to contract." I'd imagine that's not something done lightly.
I understand this sentiment, and my only concern is Kanye's acquisition legitimizing anti-semitism and pushing vulnerable fans into radicalization via that platform.
If they commit a crime, a judge and/or jury, informed by the testimony of medical experts, determines whether someone was cognizant of right and wrong. This is not uncommon in the criminal justice system.
Now, responsibility on the larger scale is indeed murky. We societally at once say addicts are and aren't responsible for their behavior (depending upon one's point of view and what acts took place): a drunk driver is treated differently than a homeless addict living under a bridge. Is Kanye 'addicted' to manic states? Should we look down upon him because he won't take his meds? I'm not sure.
This is no where near the same situation. When Elon originally put is offer to buy Twitter, Twitter didn't even want to sell. Then the market crashed and all the sudden Elon's own offer was almost double of the "fair market price" for Twitter.
Elon would be insane if he made the same offer today.
Twitter clearly took full advantage of his irrational hard on to get a signed deal. Not “being scammed” in that Twitter very nuch did not seek out the deal, but they certainly fully leveraged his willingness to toss out preconditions any sane purchaser would demand.
> Having a celebrity owner increases the value.
As a mascot, maybe, unless they are polarizing and their area of negative appeal overlaps with the product’s market and their positve appeal doesn’t; but owners are also decision makers, and celebrity’s are going to be all over the map in that role.
Twitter didn't want to sell to him in the first place. Musk's buyout offer took place in the context of a months-long drama about Musk being on the board. It's hard to look at the Musk/Twitter situation and say that it was driven forward by anyone other than Musk.
(I have no particular reason to believe Musk is in anything less than full control of his faculties.)
> This is really a story about a celebrity's mental illness and public breakdown.
I find this take interesting -- Kanye is insanely successful in multiple categories. He is very eccentric and always has been.
> Kanye is now a Black Hebrew Israelite
That said, calling him mentally ill or having a breakdown is a bit... odd. There are tens of thousands of "Black Hebrews", there are MANY more Scientologists. Is Tom Cruise mentally ill? Maybe, but people can have different beliefs than me and I wouldn't call them mentally ill.
Regarding Pete Davidson...
> “The 78 media outlets that called me an abuser when I was tryna get that heroin addict away from my kids that was tattooing my kids’ names on him, Skete, Pete Davidson…” said West. Davidson has spoken about his struggles with drugs and borderline personality disorder in the past.
I think a lot of the tabloid press is trying to make Kanye sound crazier than he is. That's how they sell stuff. Don't get me wrong, he's a bit off and he'll say things in a hyperbolic way (which is accurate.. but the connected dots don't always make sense).
Anyway, my point is I think dismissing someone as "mentally ill" for having different beliefs or opinions is probably not the best. It's a fair opinion, but I wouldn't assess it that way. He's acting rationally for his belief set.
> That said, calling him mentally ill or having a breakdown is a bit... odd.
Kanye himself has said, in the past, that he has bipolar disorder and has had manic episodes. His family has corroborated that, and his wife was open about taking responsibilities during the bad days.
Agree. Having far out views, even a lot of them, doesn’t make you crazy. I’m especially hesitant to judge sanity by conformity with popular political opinions. I get the sense that many are reveling in the opportunity to call a political opponent crazy with the safety of numbers.
Believing in a lot of conspiracy theories, in isolation, also doesn’t make someone “crazy”.
I don’t know the man, neither does anyone here so far.
My interest is in seeing more social media migrate to open, federated protocols.
I think you aren't being hard enough on Kanye. I just signed up for Parler (https://parler.com/breckyunits) and there are barely any ads on that site—he clearly doesn't know what he's doing.
People keep saying he's sick or he is wrong, yet his popularity keeps growing. Same for net worth. His tweets are getting 3-5x the engagement compared to a year ago. Maybe it's all part of the act.
Does engagement mean he is truly popular or that people are tuning into the spectacle? I think it would be true for most celebrities sliding into mental decline that their more deranged tweets would get a lot more eyes on them.
This is a black man who is a unicorn in two industries. One of the most successful black people of all time. Who is fighting to establish black ownership in those industries.
Here’s his latest full interview where he goes into detail on what he’s been saying. I highly encourage you to watch at least the first 20 minutes:
“I respect what the Jewish people have done and how they brought their people together” he isn’t just spewing anti semitism he’s making a principled stand for his people owning more of the industries they run and airing specific problems. Feel free to engage with them.
(YouTube is censoring it because I guess you can critique whites and other ethnic groups all you want, but not Jews). I’m not endorsing anything here, but it’s clear he’s far within the realm of sanity. Accusations against someone’s sanity are of the ultimate nature, it’s a shame you lob them so.
But in it he actually clearly addresses everything you mention: Pete, Gap, Corey, and more. All of your points he has logical explanations for and I highly doubt you’re familiar with then since it seems you only follow Instagram posts, which is ludicrous.
In it I hear someone who is incredibly well controlled, who is speaking clearly and logically, and who has legitimate greviances borne out of experience. In fact I was surprised, as he’s always been a bit of a spaz in interviews (nothing too unusual, just within range ADHD, stress, narcissism would be my guess), so I was expecting worse. But if anything he seems more rational and grounded than ever.
Frank Zappa had plenty of legal issues with people of that background in the recording industry and we never heard anything more untoward from him than a certain unfortunately titled song Google likes to censor out of albums. No “death con 3” , etc.
Hah, this is spot on. It's like groundhog day every week and interesting to watch in real time. I've been mostly tuned out for years now. People say to me all the time, "Have you heard of <insert outrage for the week here>?!" I usually reply with a "No" which results in a regurgitative and passionate explanation.
I just don't understand the phenomenon of people moving from one day/week to the next, with a social media influencer or MSM feeding them the next thing to care about. I would be more dismissive of it, but when it starts spilling over into real life; workplaces, road rage, etc. - it is detrimental to society. At what point do people see this for what it is and wake up?
It's more of a story of a famous artist who thinks for himself and has been marginalized for years as a result.
Every time he says something that deviates from the accepted narrative, he is attacked and dismissed as "crazy", "insane", "sick". Many non-normative geniuses throughout history have been treated in this manner.
Before anyone strawmans this, he does occasionally say things that should be condemned, particularly over the past week. Understandably people are focused on those remarks, but two things can be true at the same time.
1. He has been systematically marginalized and labeled as "crazy" every time he presents an alternative viewpoint. This has been going on for years.
2. He overcorrects when placed in a box. The more people try to control him, the more he tries to break out of that box by being purposefully provocative.
Again: not only is he diagnosed, he's open about about it. He literally attributes his success to his mental illness. His "thinking for himself" includes the a paranoid delusion about literal fake children corrupting his children. You're not doing him any favors by dignifying this stuff.
The irony here is I'm not condemning West. I'm recognizing the terrible situation he's in. It's your analysis that's uncharitable to him, not mine. I think he's a victim in this story.
He is open about having been diagnosed, not about having a "public breakdown", being "increasingly unhinged" or "quite evidently sick". Those are your inventions. Though they might well be true I think one should be careful diagnosing people at a distance (and without being a mental health professional) especially when it is used as a justification for taking away someone's agency (which I acknowledge you haven't done, but others in this thread/saga are doing).
Are you doubling down on the following or just trying to change the direction of the conversation?
> He is open about having been diagnosed, not about having a "public breakdown", being "increasingly unhinged" or "quite evidently sick". Those are your inventions.
Correct. The responses around this are absolutely pathetic, and many of them believe that he is unable to think for himself because he is buying Parler. So what if he is buying it. I'd say good for him, he can rebrand it if he wants to.
Did the self-proclaimed HN doctors question his decision to collaborate with Adidas, Nike, etc by becoming a fashion designer with his Yezzy label which made him a billionaire? They didn't care in the first place; but because of Parler now they care?
> 1. He has been systematically marginalized and labeled as "crazy" every time he presents an alternative viewpoint. This has been going on for years.
> 2. He overcorrects when placed in a box. The more people try to control him, the more he tries to break out of that box by being purposefully provocative.
Well the same people who are calling him "crazy", "insane", "sick" are the same who believe everything that is said by the media. You go against the media narrative and they will punish you. Criticising and exposing some of the media's lies and the cancelling will happen and Ye knows that.
This also explains the unexplained downvotes because it is all true.
My grandma is beginning to look like she has dementia. But we, as a family, aren't at a point where we're thinking of taking away her agency. She's a proud woman and always has been.
In many cases, its probably better for the person for them to keep their agency. If they're only going to lose money, its really not that big of a deal. We're more concerned about what if she has a fall by herself or other such issue. But those things won't be solved by revoking her agency.
But just because someone is mentally ill (dementia, bipolar, or even schizophrenic) doesn't mean they deserve to lose their agency and get power of attorney invoked over them.
Has anyone close to you been in a mentally ill situation? Have you ever tried to tell someone you love, someone you trusted, someone you used to look up to that their mental capabilities have declined and that you no longer trust them to watch over themselves? And if so, do you think taking away their ability to use their bank account is the solution to that problem?
> If they're only going to lose money, its really not that big of a deal.
This depends on what will happen after they run out of money.
Someone very close to me has an untreated dual diagnosis (mentally ill + substance abuse disorder). She is otherwise young and intelligent, and with treatment she could at least theoretically have a full life. However she refuses all attempts at help, has been unemployed for over a year, is paranoid and isolated and alone from and abusive to friends and family, is burning through her savings, and will soon get to the point where she will have to foreclose on her house.
At that point she will literally be an unemployed, homeless, mentally ill drug addict.
This is a major problem in our individualistic society with no easy answer. As my coach says, people don’t change when they see the light, only when they feel the heat. She may need to crash and burn, and she may pick herself back up. But the odds on that happening for someone in her position are not good.
And meanwhile we all have to watch someone we love slowly descend into ruin.
My mother is in the early/mid stages of dementia, and she recently granted my father and I power of attorney. It doesn't have to be a "taking away" if they can be convinced that it's in their best interested. Admittedly ymmv, it helps that my mother is a retired psychologist. Also it's hardly a "solution"; it's merely a mitigation. In the months before we did it my mother had been scammed out of thousands of dollars multiple times. There are so many scammers out there targeting the elderly/mentally ill, it's only matter of when not if.
I think in your case, having someone cooperate into giving power of attorney is the best case. But in this case, my grandmother is still too proud to willingly give power of attorney to any of her children.
If she willingly gives it, I think we'll take her up on the offer. But she doesn't think she's been scammed yet. We likely have to wait until after she's realized how she's been taken advantage of before she's in the position to willingly give us power of attorney.
Forcibly taking it before that realization would be counterproductive.
> Has anyone close to you been in a mentally ill situation? Have you ever tried to tell someone you love, someone you trusted, someone you used to look up to that their mental capabilities have declined and that you no longer trust them to watch over themselves?
I have, but it doesn't really look like that. It's a gradual assumption of responsibilities by the caregivers that roughly corresponds to the person's decline.
> do you think taking away their ability to use their bank account is the solution to that problem?
It's a solution, yes, when they could dramatically harm their situation/themselves doing things they no longer have the capacity to understand.
And in that case, it seemed like her holding company was abusing her.
So invoking power-of-attorney over someone isn't always the solution to their mental health. Its an extreme move, and I'm really not sure if its designed to be used in the typical mental-health case.
Its not like the mentally ill are suddenly incapable of performing useful work, or unable to watch over themselves. They just have... delusions, bad memory, swings of mood, terrible sleeping habits, etc. etc. They need help, not someone walking in and stealing their money / taking their house / losing all sense of agency all together.
Mental health is... difficult, but livable. Extreme actions like invoking power-of-attorney probably makes things worse in more situations IMO.
You may be thinking of Legal Guardianship. Power of attorney just means someone is authorized to make the same legal decisions as the subject of the power of attorney and can be overridden by the subject.
Brittany Spears was subject to and abused by Guardianship.
It was a lot harder to make those public remarks when Brittney was at her lowest publicly than it is for Kanye right now.
I'm not saying Brittney would have, just saying that it's easier to have a very public manic episode where your every thought is aired than it was 15 years ago.
Because doing such a thing to someone as young and quite honestly as sane as him is absurd, regardless of what twitter people thing. The man is completely capable of making his own decisions and is not a real threat to anyone, at least not enough of a threat to pass the bar for having his agency as an individual taken away.
The whole situation with britney spears was a tragedy and we need to stop thinking that these measures are a realistic way to treat things except for the most egregious cases. Having a mental illness and making bad decisions because of it is not one of those cases, else you can bet the political opposition of whatever party/whistleblowers/etc will start magically having mental illnesses and making bad decisions because of it as well.
Did you not watch the Netflix documentary? The last episodes contained many non-obviously-sane conversations. Especially the one where he was talking to bankers at one of their vacation homes.
I’ve seen plenty of weird conversations in the workforce like leaders living in an alternate reality than direct reports to hawk their views, yet never felt motivated to call them mentally ill. I don’t judge how people feel they need to speak to relate to anybody, especially under the influence of alcohol as Kanye was in that segment.
This is simply the latest in a long line of erratic behavior, which eld to a pretty public divorce. The man has no friends or family left, only yes-men.
For good reason. Invoking power of attorney solves no fundamental problems and just creates a ton of other problems.
It should only be done in the most extreme of cases (ie: someone turns into a literal vegetable on life support). If someone still has a degree of agency and capabilities... even if they're delusional and/or mentally ill, they still deserve to live their life. IE: Control their own bank accounts and whatnot.
he is a victim of his own choices... I don't want to sound callous, but to be honest, we all face a much more harsh and unforgiving future than him if we made the same mistakes. He has squandered the good faith he built over many years by making bad decisions. Somehow he generated wealth out of it all, but continued to make bad decisions in hopes of hanging on to his dramatic public personality/popularity. It's not for me to judge of course, but it's a vital lesson to us all in the age of Internet fame, integrity and reputation matter... The more we forgive and cast a blind eye to people that "sell out" based those principles, the more we end up forgetting exactly why morality, good conduct, and positive reputations matter in life.
Would you say the same about a schizophrenic who refuses to stay on his meds and ends up ranting at people while living under a bridge?
People with bipolar disorder sometimes won't take their meds for a variety reasons, one being they seek the energy of manic episodes (one in my acquaintance had only had one major manic episode in her entire life but she put up with depression for years in hope of having another one).
Kanye West has stated in interviews that he's a.) bipolar and b.) doesn't take his meds because they interfere with his creative process. This man is not well.
His wife's new boyfriend got their kids' initials tattooed on his neck. That's deranged and suggesting that an angry response is evidence of mental illness is way into "positing unnecessary entities" territory.
Bizarre. In a way, good on them for editing the weirdest stuff out... But really probably shouldn't have used any of it when someone's so clearly in such a bad state?
I mean it really is just driving clicks/views/profit from someone's poor health, in a nasty sort of way (i.e. not to say news or obituaries etc. are bad) isn't it?
There's some interesting footage of Tucker Carlson exposing the way Fox operates, from a decade before he became the main guy doing it for them. Very weird to watch:
A celebrity says some things that make sense, and some things that don't, and it's nasty profiteering to report on the former? That really seems a bit extreme to me.
I didn't watch it or anything, so I'm definitely biased by only having read an article about 'even more unhinged bits leaked' as it were, but wasn't it all a bit sensational? Depends what you call 'makes sense' I suppose, I think one perhaps needs a higher bar when it's in the context of such a conversation, where other things are clearly paranoia; if he's clearly not 'himself', why should someone else get to judge which bits 'make sense' 'enough'?
I watched it, and it was an engaging mix of lucidity, nonsense, insight, and delusion. Intended to be a 30 minute interview, Kanye had much on his mind, and they went for two hours. He wasn't clearly not himself; he's always like this during his public, manic phases. (He goes dark during his depressive phases.)
I think our society has gotten so used to pop stars who are safe, sanitized, vapid graduates of Disney kids, and "transgressive" high artists bravely fighting the against dead horses slain generations ago, that we've lost the capacity to handle artists who can be disturbing and awkward at times, and creatively redeeming at others, but can't easily be categorized as perfectly good or purely evil.
Those 2 things are not the same thing. Someone who changes their gender to what they feel they should be, including a new gender name is very much different then a person changing their name to a mononym.
What if it's just a narcissist? What if it's a combination of both? He's made blantent antisemitic remarks and yet his popularity among the right grows
Im not insinuating it, I’m saying it. It’s clear as day to anyone who’s been paying attention, one reason being the connection you yourself pointed out. How else can you explain antisemitic comments leading to higher popularity amongst the right, other than the right generally agreeing with or at least being sympathetic to antisemitic views?
It might not contribute at all. My evidence being the countless people who are bipolar but don't make antisemitic remarks and the countless people who aren't bipolar and do.
I read that unlike Elon he didn't sign a binding deal to buy for a set price. Just an agreement to consider a purchase. So if he's "sick", apparently not as much as other people.
Sound very much like the guy who started Zappos - clearly there was evidence he was on a downward spiral but people and so-called friends around him used it scam him.
Call me cynical, but I think the likes of Kanye, the Kardashians, Trump, even Elon, etc. are much more calculated than they are deranged. They know how to work the media and manipulate the public better than anyone else. We're living in a world now where journalists are paid by click counts more than quality of content. In the same vein, Kanye and the likes know that the more absurdist and unconventional their actions, the more publicity they get.
This isn't an either/or: Kanye West (or anybody else) can be simultaneously shrewd, calculating, and mentally unwell. Nobody has claimed that Kanye is stupid or otherwise compensating, only that he has a publicly attested history of mental health problems.
Maybe the current media environment selects individuals that just happen to do well in such an environment. People that crave attention and are just naturally gifted at attracting it. Basically "effective narcissists".
I think this is it. The environment enables the behaviour and the CAUSE of said behaviour can be multiple things separately or at once. The right kind of deranged combined with the right kind of stupid? Maybe that works. Completely manipulative and not deranged at all? Maybe that works too.
Why not both? I agree with you that all of those people know how to play the media to their benefit, but Kanye is also clearly bipolar and currently in one of his episodes, and Trump also clearly is the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder. The Kardashians and Elon have their flaws too, but I don’t think they rise to the level of clinical issues in the way that Kanye and Trump do.
Nobody in their sane mind would say some of the stuff that Kanye said/tweeted, but as well there's very few people who have the ability to profit off making insane statements to the extent that people like Kanye or Trump can. It's almost like a perpetual vicious cycle of profitable victimhood.
I was never a big fan of the guy's work but he was an incredible producer back in the late 90s early 2000s. I think him experiencing the death of his mother was the start of a very serious downward cycle (mentally, at least) that he's yet to recover from.
Exactly. They know what they are doing. And calling out the crazy inevitably repeats whatever they were saying, giving it even more publicity and them attention.
To be clear, he's saying that it felt like everyone already had their message about Uvalde coordinated before the Uvalde event had fully come out in the news to the point where even The Gap, a store as removed as possible from being a news organization, had a message prepared. That feels different than "people at the Gap knew about Uvalde". Is that still an insane thing to say?
First, he said that it "felt like the people at the Gap knew about the school shooting that Matthew McConaughey was talking about before it even happened", comparing it to the movie _The Truman Show_. In response to Carlson's request for clarification he does say "I'm not saying that they did" but he clearly doesn't rule it out, either.
Second, it's not clear what statement by The Gap he's talking about, but my guess is that this is related to the delayed launch of his product line:
So the most upvoted comment claims West said "the "people at the Gap" knew about Uvalde". But he actually said "it felt like" that was the case, while adding that "I'm not saying that they did"? I mean, maybe we should just stick to what he actually said. I wonder how accurate the other claims about his claims are.
They knew there was going to be a mass-casualty school shooting ahead of time because there's a mass-casualty school shooting every few months in this country
It's a (sad) reality that if you're doing any kind of public relations you need to plan for the very real possibility that your giant brand launch is going to coincide with a national tragedy.
Yeah, I agree. I'm not a conservative, but if I were I wouldn't want Kanye (or Trump) to be the one championing my views. Find someone who (1) actually has conservative views, (2) isn't mentally ill, and (3) can articulate those views persuasively. Thomas Sowell might be considered a good example.
Obviously no one is arguing that we should attack mentally ill people. We can acknowledge that mental illness impairs decision making ability without attacking people. It doesn't even mean that people can't agree with some of Kanye's conclusions, but if you are such a person, consider finding a champion for your ideas who can do a better job of articulating those ideas.
You don't need to know him personally. He's talked publicly about being bipolar and how it makes him imagine scenarios exactly like those he has described recently. His recent behaviour has all the hallmarks of a bipolar episode. I think there's a good discussion to be had about how we should talk about situations like this but dismissing it out of hand definitely isn't helpful.
> I don't think you can say anything so factual about his life, let alone that he's being scammed.
One thing I think it's possible to say definitively is that he was played by Tucker Carlson's team. The comments they didn't air, like those about Jewish people, are headline making. Any serious journalistic outfit would have aired them. The fact that they cut around them shows that they wanted to paint Kanye in a particular way for their own purposes.
He believes his kids friends are "professional actors" who were placed there to "sexualize" them, that The Gap knew about the Uvalde shooting before it happened, and that Pete Davidson slept with his wife through the mechinations of an international Jewish conspiracy. You're doing the same thing Fox did: quoting the least unhinged things and pretending the most unhinged things didn't get said.
And, as I'm sure will have to be repeated dozens more times on this doomed thread: the mental illness thing isn't hypothetical. He was hospitalized for it, diagnosed, and is open about it. He attributes his success to it!
Thing is, I need to see the primary source before I can make a judgement. I tried to find the source for the first claim and it seems to be a quote from this Vice article:
>Carlson’s program also didn’t air a strange claim from Ye that “fake children” had been placed in his house to manipulate his children. “I mean, like actors, professional actors, placed into my house to sexualize my kids,” he told Carlson. He referred to the “so-called son” of an associate, seemingly to imply the child was fake.
> He believes his kids friends are "professional actors" who were placed there to "sexualize" them
Considering the way the entertainment industry in America uses kids, this is one of the least insane things Kanye has said. Anybody with sense would try to keep their kids away from the entertainment industry, who groom children to be products without regard for their welfare. How many former child actors need to go crazy before you notice the pattern?
Millions of people believe the Covid vaccine was designed to kill them, or that the Clintons eat fetuses in pizzerias. Millions more are absolutely certain a Jewish secret cabal runs the world. Are they "insane", or just dumb?
Kanye West is pushing conspiracies a little further, into the domestic realm.
What's upsetting is that when ordinary John Does promote conspiracy theories they are shunned, but when it's a successful artist we try to find them excuses.
He's not unwell because he's antisemitic. Maybe he's antisemitic all the time, but it seems probable that he's antisemitic because he's unwell. He doesn't seem unwell because he's antisemitic. He seems unwell because he believes that his children's friends are fake child actors installed by a conspiracy to sexualize them, and that a (possibly related?) Jewish conspiracy caused Pete Davidson to sleep with his ex-wife. Most people do not believe anything like those two statements.
This is what happens in these discussions: people take the genuinely batshit things he's saying and then generalize them to a point where they're merely stupid, and not batshit. Then they say "well, that might be wrong, but it's not crazy!". Well, you're right: it's not crazy. It's also not what he said.
You have posted this generic answer several times. Ok. Maybe he's "unwell". My point though is that there is very little difference between believing that your children are child actors and believing that politicians eat fetuses in a pizzeria on a regular basis. Both things are completely out there and rely on zero evidence.
Also, believing members of your family are impersonators or aliens is something young siblings try to persuade one another all the time. It's not unheard of.
Anyway, my larger point is that we should not tolerate antisemitism because of "crazy". Just because one adds outrageous beliefs on top of hate doesn't excuse the hate.
>but when it's a successful artist we try to find them excuses.
This is, to me, what is missing from this entire thing. Kanye is bipolar, yes, but I don't think anything he's points to some kind of manic outburst. What he said over the past few weeks have be fairly mainstream (or sub-mainstream) conservative talking points. Maybe not the ones that get blasted on Fox News, but the ones that shared and like with Fox News posts on Facebook.
To me the "Kanye is mentally ill" is a cover to hide some very pervasive talking points in conservative circles. It's an extension of the mass misinformation problems that we as a society have been dealing with since COVID and Kanye is the latest victim.
I think if you follow along with Kanye, it is obvious it is beyond normal celebrity "insanity". I feel bad for him because I really grew up listening to his music and still have a soft spot in my heart for him, but he has some incredible delusions it would seem in the last 5-10 years.
It's a fact that the guy is very publicly suffering from mental illness. Let's please not insinuate that he's being smeared for "disagreeing with the status quo" or not conforming to mainstream ideas, or some other common right wing victimhood nonsense.
When you say crazy things, it is correct to call them crazy.
> This is really a story about a celebrity's mental illness and public breakdown.
Devil's advocate: there's no way this isn't the case for Kanye, right? Why is this mental illness sparking up later in his life? Why was he able to achieve everything he's achieved 1996 -> 2012 (Roc-A-Fella -> The College Dropout -> My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy era) without these "mental illness" bouts?
I have bipolar disorder which is characterized by extreme highs and extreme lows. Ye is manic right now in my estimation. Bipolars like me and Ye have lives of periods of success and periods of failure. You can read about bipolar if you'd like to learn more.
My estimation is that he's schizophrenic (in addition to being bipolar -- they do often go hand in hand). I've seen not one but two people get dragged into the hell of that disease, and both began with buying into antisemitic conspiracy theories.
This is key to understanding bipolar: it has an "upswing" phase in which someone has more energy and less inhibition. Increased self-belief as well. It can, if you're lucky, be just the right thing to catapult someone into incredible creative works.
The risk is that risk-taking may not pay off, and the inhibitions may have been there for good reason. Not to mention that there's also a downswing phase which looks like depression and comes with elevated suicide risk.
I used to know a lady with Bipolar. She thought the highs were totally worth it, and she was self-aware enough when she was swinging into a low period, and she'd just isolate herself until she came out of it. She didn't like her medication because it dulled the highs.
After a few major life disasters (including getting married, and then having it annulled), she eventually figured out that the highs were fun but dangerous. I haven't talked to her in years, but she was reliably taking her meds to keep her even keel.
My friend was pretty self-aware though. Someone less so may not be able to see that their illness is the true cause of their life disasters.
Hopefully some day we can figure out a solution that can help brunt the lows without completely brunting the highs. Although people do dumb stuff on the high swing too.
He's diagnosed with bipolar back in 2016 and talks about refusing medication because it messes with his ability to create/be creative.
It's possible that he's exhibited symptoms for far longer but it was brushed aside under the guise of kooky genius. I mean, the Taylor Swift thing was, what, 2009?
It seemed pretty fair at the time, like I remember being confused by why it caused such a media furor. You could disagree, of course, but you could also see given the circumstances why someone would say it.
I'd definitely say it was fair at the time as that was around Hurricane Katrina and the vast majority of the most affected people at the time were low-income black people. IIRC some parts of the 9th Ward are still yet to recover from Katrina.....and that was 17 years ago.
> Why is this mental illness sparking up later in his life?
Anyone who has dealt with/supported folks suffering from mental illness (and I definitely qualify, there), will tell you that mental illness gets worse, as you get older.
A young man that compulsively washes his hands, may well end his life, flying around the world in a sterile airplane, keeping his piss in canopic jars.
You're acting like he hasn't had public outbursts before...
Ya know.
"George Bush doesn't care about Black People".
"Taylor, I'ma let you finish..."
MBDTF came out in 2010. That was around the beginning of social media entering the mainstream (Kanye joined Twitter in July 2010).
So up until MBDTF, he didn't have a device in his pocket that allowed him to broadcast his unfiltered thoughts to millions of people. Up until that point, his public image was likely carefully managed by his label and management. All of his interviews were probably overseen by them. They likely only allowed interviews where he was asked pre-approved questions and gave canned answers. If he went too far off script, his label likely stepped in.
It's clear now that he has a lot more freedom with handling his own image. He's been signed to his own label since 2016 which probably afforded him a lot more power over his career. He had a few moments prior to 2016 but he didn't really go off the deep until 2017.
TLDR: what you saw as stable behavior prior to 2017 or so was probably the result of a curated image created by his label and management.
One of the most common pop analyses of Kanye West is that the death of his mother in 2007 affected him deeply, and that he (essentially) goes on a mental health bender every year around the time she passed. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's not the most implausible explanation and does comport with his most recent behavior (since the anniversary of her death is a few weeks away).
That's not how mental illness works. I am not diagnosing Kanye, but look up the progression of bipolar disorder. It is truly terrifying and heartbreaking.
Whatever is going on in this individual case, Bipolar disorder is terrible. It can look like someone is "fine" for a long time, but then they aren't fine and people look for what changed, and what changed is progression of the disease.
It's really hard to talk about without adding stigmatization.
Listen to his interviews yourself. Any medium, including podcasts, are packaging a narrative for you to hear. For better or worse. Personally and I’m black I listened to his latest interview and his points are pretty strong, it becomes obvious how he is being painted in a false light after hearing the interviews for yourself then hearing other people use clips to say he’s mentally ill and crazy.
This wouldn't surprise me. I haven't listened to the interviews myself, but a lot of people here seem to base their claims on having read secondary sources, not primary sources. In other words, their view of reality is based on how a journalist decided to summarize a conversation that is often multiple hours long. I'm not sure this constitutes a strong enough chain of evidence to diagnose someone with a mental illness.
Would those be the points where he rehashes the same antisemitic tropes which have circulated for hundreds of years and every once in a while leads to the massacres of innocent people? Because if he doesn’t get an out due to mental illness he is just another little attention whore neonazi.
Could you suggest a recent interview as an example? I’d like to judge myself.
I’m of the opinion he’s both someone with good intentions with good points but who makes those points sideways. But also that he’s mentally I’ll so he’s losing the ability to communicate clearly. I also think Candace Owens is an untrustworthy person with only self serving intentions.
All hip hop artists (and most artists) are manic. A little bit of mania helps you make creative connections and clever rhymes. Too much mania turns you into Don Quixote.
Musk and everyone else is right that we do need a platform with free speech. The only problem is that all those free speech advocates are actually NIMBY's when it comes to free speech.
I have been following self proclaimed free speech absolutists(because I too, believe in free speech but don't believe it exists) and they are totally not the kind of people that say "I hate what you say but I will die defending your right to say it". In all places, these people are curating comments and posts to push agenda.
The only somewhat free place I've seen is 4Chan but it contains so much toxicity, that's its barely bearable.
Yet again, I like that Musk and Kanye kind of people claim that they want free speech because at least we can hold them responsible when they don't deliver it. This is in contrast with the pure fascist where they cannot be held responsible for anything because they don't claim virtue in first place. It's a bit like companies doing greenwashing, which can be exposed when they don't deliver on their claimed virtues versus companies who don't even claim such virtues and instead pretend that it doesn't matter. Those who claim virtue are better even if they ultimately fail.
I used to be free speech absolutist, but I am not any longer, especially when it comes to social media.
The argument in favor of absolute free speech for me was basically “let everyone hear everything and make up their own mind”. This presumes that people are swayed by the content of an argument. This is a false assumption, people are mostly swayed by the volume of the argument. This is well documented in psychological research. Now, if everyone had the same level of visibility for their personal speech this would just lead to an ersatz version of opinion democracy, where the most often held opinions would rise to the top, which wouldn’t be a bad thing.
But people don’t have equal visibility. The reach of a wealthy or famous person is so much greater that in the political arena basically only the speech of the wealthy and famous ends up having enough volume to convince people, even if it starts out wildly unpopular and even if it is objectively false. Social media are especially sensitive to this thanks to the ability to buy access to views without the viewers even realizing, to micro-target audiences, and to have zero independent vetting of what is said. This then perverts absolute free speech into a weapon used by the powerful to deceive and subvert democracies.
That’s why I think that to protect democracies we must have some limits on the ability to get speech amplification through (social) media, but I don’t have a hard and fast rule for what that should look like. It is far easier to say “let everything pass” but that is the easy way out and ultimately bad.
Same here. The notion of "free speech" was one of the most successful and liberating memes (in the original sense of the word) in human history. But with the advent of technology, overflow attacks on free speech make unrestricted speech as useless as no speech.
It's like living in darkness, and then someone invents light, and everyone cries "more light", and it's great, and then after a while the light gets so bright that it's blinding, making the light useless for its original purpose of letting you see things, and yet we still cry "more light" because we're afraid of going back to the darkness.
I don't know what new thing to replace the rallying cry if "free speech" with. Something about signal-to-noise ratio, but all the alternatives involve trusting people to moderate, which is obviously an undesirable property compared to the original concept, but I think it might be simply unavoidable. At a high enough level, free speech itself can be used to eliminate free speech.
> If you block people on Twitter you’re not truly open to different arguments or ideas. Similarly if you were truly open to trying new and different foods, you’d eat this hot dog I found in the gutter.
I think in the context of social media the replacement/adjunct rallying cry is "free association", i.e. moderation. I don't have to engage with racist nonsense or the people who produce it.
How exactly that's done is certainly an area for competition/innovation between the social networks, but ultimately the ability to not have to hear some categories of speech is the answer.
Before social media did anyone read every book ever published? Did anyone read all the rejected manuscripts to avoid the censorious hand of the publishing houses? Of course not, we accepted that someone (editors) were doing some first pass quality check and even then we pick what areas are interesting.
There's two related but distinct problems: the moderation problem and the village idiots problem[0]. Polarization _can_ come from moderation, but there's also a whole debate to be had about what is driving what. For example: Alex Jones' whole saga has been spun by some as "being punished for conservative beliefs", so yeah, I guess if he's a conservative then him being pushed off social might cause polarization. BUT I think it's important to note that 10 years ago if you said Jones was a conservative, almost _all_ conservatives would have said something "the interdimensional vampire guy? Don't lump us in with that crazy bastard". During the intervening years right wing leaders have increasingly signaled that Jones is one of theirs. That was a top down series of decisions more than social media's impact. In order to believe that "your team" is being punished you already had to believe that Jones was on your team. If the statement "Alex Jones is on my team and I'm on a mainstream political team" is true, then you're _already_ polarized. The moderation might make it worse but something severely fucked up has already happened.
The (potentially violent) extremism, though, is really about the idiots getting together and self reinforcing (for example incel groups periodically spinning out a mass shooter). Moderation isn't really going to impact the second problem since when they get booted from one platform they migrate to a less moderated one or spin up their own.
[0] Borrowing Peter Singer's framing from here: "Once, every village had an idiot. It took the internet to bring them all together."
I think you may have misinterpreted what I was saying. I'm not arguing against moderation, I was saying I believe the self-reinforcing bubbles of social media on e.g. Facebook and Reddit have been a big driver of polarization and extremism.
Before social media, most people didn't get their info from books, they got it from TV, and you had a couple big channels that essentially led to most people having some sort of consensus on the few versions of reality that were broadcast by the media.
Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing is another discussion, but at least we didn't have the degree of balkanization and polarization we do now.
I was saying that having social media function as is, but doubling down on tools to help people screen out what they don't like, which is what the person I was responding to suggested, would, I think, just accelerate that balkanization. So I don't know that it's a good solution.
Free speech to me is not going to jail for saying you think Hitler is a swell guy or you hate the president. It has nothing to do with protected algorithmic amplification of hate speech which is what a lot of bad actors are clinging to it for.
It's complicated - that's Free Speech as a right, but Free Speech as a virtue has a history in liberal thought that goes deeper than just protection from the government - most notably, Mill in On Liberty. There's an unfortunate but understandable tendency to conflate these two things.
It gets further complicated so that if you tell a joke in poor taste or in haste without considering the future and other implications you can get retroactively "cancelled".
So today you say something that is acceptable. But maybe tomorrow, after you turn 18, someone discovers your statement and they cancel you using today's judgements.
The solution is for the metaphorical adults in the room to stand up and proclaim "cool story; we don't care" when someone comes knocking at their door with evidence of misdoings of one of their employees. Just claim it's a faked screenshot and your internal review processes do not act on false information.
I’m not really conflating them here. The bad actors argue that having access to algorithmic amplification is a right. As an aside, how do we fit bots into JSM’s framework?
Exactly! Free speech is to protect you from being jailed or executed by the state for publicly held opinions. It has absolutely nothing to do with twitter, and I believe anyone arguing that it does is arguing in bad faith or out of ignorance to the actual purpose of the free speech clause of the first amendment.
You have this completely backwards. The first amendment is the US' constitutional protection of free speech. Free speech itself is an inalienable right. You would have the right to free speech regardless of whether or not your government protects it (which many don't). Governments do not grant rights.
Free speech on Twitter is a matter of values. It is not a matter of whether or not Twitter is legally liable to protect free speech (they're not) but whether they should protect it because it's something that is worthwhile protecting.
Given the ubiquity of social media and its current massive role in communicating and share ideas, what role should the companies behind these services play?
If you have a right and the government isn't protecting it, do you really have a right? Sure you can get all philosophical and say things like every soul has a right to X Y and Z, but that doesn't mean anything in practice outside of the ivory tower if the government you are beholden to has a stance to the contrary.
OTOH if its only about values and not about the actual legal idea of freedom of speech, then you can argue with that logic that there is also a moral value in protecting groups of individuals from being the subject of vitriol and hate speech on a forum you own. That's the position Twitter et al. have taken in this regard.
> If you have a right and the government isn't protecting it, do you really have a right?
Yes, but only to the extent that you're capable of protecting it yourself. This is why the second amendment exists in the United States. I don't really care to get into whether or not this a valid point of view since that could be its entire own discussion, but that is at least partially the rationale behind protecting people's rights to procure weaponry.
> Sure you can get all philosophical and say things like every soul has a right to X Y and Z, but that doesn't mean anything in practice outside of the ivory tower if the government you are beholden to has a stance to the contrary.
I get what you're saying but unless the government does some minority report type thing where they arrest you before you exercise your rights, most people will still get to in the real world exercise it at least once. A person doesn't lose their right to free speech just because they are dumb or otherwise incapable of communicating their speech, either.
> OTOH if its only about values and not about the actual legal idea of freedom of speech, then you can argue with that logic that there is also a moral value in protecting groups of individuals from being the subject of vitriol and hate speech on a forum you own. That's the position Twitter et al. have taken in this regard.
This is in fact where I think the most interesting discussion can occur. What values should social media platforms be enforcing? I personally think that censoring speech broadly on the platform is in most cases inappropriate — Twitter and the like can make tools to help people insulate themselves from people they don't wish to see or interact with. Some of these already exist, but they could expand them. They could even create features that allow users to preemptively take action on types of speech they find objectionable (advanced filtering techniques).
I find this preferable because it allows the broader community to maintain discourse (even if some people find it abhorrent) and importantly grants individuals agency over the type of speech they engage with.
This conflict isn't just about people's feelings being hurt, which is what having the ability to enter a bubble where you don't hear anything that would offend you would protect against.
It's bigger than that - what if these ideas become popular and we elect a leader whose primary drive is to go "death con 3 on the jews"?
This is how I look at it as well. The government can't come knocking because I have opinions. It doesn't mean I get to espouse those opinions anywhere I please (hotel lobby, shopping mall, concert, stadium) where it becomes a public disturbance. I'm free to write about whatever my opinions are but I'm not free to force someone to publish them.
To those who espouse the idea that comments should be filtered for the greater good, I say 'You first.'
There was a time period when the left was for free speech and the right was wanting to constrain it. Maybe its just a giant pendulum - there is no right/left difference when it comes to free speech - everyone wants to censor / filter the speech of the opposite side.
If things come in cycles, then I expect the right to take over more and more (see the european shift) and then for them to slowly become in favor of censorship. Maybe then - if we are lucky - the left will remember that censorship is always the enemy even if it helps them currently.
This is truly one of the best moderated places on the internet IMO, and one of the only places after 20 years of posting on message boards that I can go without hurtling toward a flame war every time I log on nowadays. Part of it is, I'm opinionated and I think probably enjoy arguing more than might be reasonable sometimes. Another part though is that the moderation quality is so high here and so low on places like Reddit + Twitter. My 2 pence.
Probably the lack of ability to advertise here the way you are encouraged to do on Twitter/FB/IG/Reddit (because they need that revenue) factors in as well.
One of the things I appreciate about HN is that I can still read the posts that are removed (with showdead enabled).
I don't care much about my freedom to speak. My voice will never be a significant influence on the world anyway. What I care about is my freedom to listen. I value the freedom to review all the evidence and all the arguments then draw my own conclusions.
I don't often want to read dead comments. They are mostly low quality and deserve their status. Nevertheless, showdead is sometimes quite useful and the transparency gives me more faith in the moderation.
> everyone wants to censor / filter the speech of the opposite side.
This is mostly because the left/right spectrum is too nebulous to be genuinely useful at understanding most people's values, which tend to be more nuanced than a one dimensional spectrum allows for. People that want to censor/filter speech are authoritarians. Nothing about authoritarianism uniquely binds it to the left or the right.
The right is still for censorship, but selectively just for the things they want censored. There’s no pendulum, just an explosion in hypocrisy. The left used to rely on goodwill and ethical human behavior to do their “censorship” for them, but we’ve lost that at this point and people don’t care if they’re perceived as evil anymore because they have a large enough mutual admiration club now.
There are a lot of examples of this and the left has had some truly great advocates for free speech. In terms of time period, the Red Scare and Mccarthyism was a time when the left was being heavily censored by the right. The Civil Rights movements as well with MLK during the 1960s and then Frank Kameny in the 1970s trying to get rights for gays.
Other leftist advocates for free speech include Obama, Elenor Roosevelt, and Aryeh Neier are brilliant examples.
What counts as "free speech" tends to be subjective: was MLK pro-free-speech or against it? That depends on whose speech you're considering. I can give even earlier counter-examples with left/right flipped (e.g. abolitionist literature in the south).
My initial point wasn't that it never happened, only to show there were never deliberate, strategic positions on free speech by the left or right- only messy tactical circumstances. Not long before McCarthyism was Japanese internment by a giant of the left: FDR.
Obama famously called someone a "jack-ass" after they exercised their free speech on-stage. He also railed against the Citizens United ruling. Having a binary "for/against free speech" is reductive.
> This presumes that people are swayed by the content of an argument.
Freedom is a good in and of itself. Our rights don't need to serve a larger purpose.
Imagine asking for permission to read a book and being asked, "but what good would you reading this book do for society?" The answer of corse is that it doesn't matter -- our civil rights are not transactional -- they do not exist to serve others.
> This presumes that people are swayed by the content of an argument. This is a false assumption, people are mostly swayed by the volume of the argument.
That's only half the story. The other half is tone. I have been persuaded against several beliefs that should have won me over if volume were the only consideration due to the quality of the writing. "These people type like morons, it's probably a belief primarily found amidst the stupid", as it were.
There is a very easy theoretical solution to this, discourage platforms beyond a certain size and incentivize topical groups instead of geography. It's just hard to make these kind of regulations at this point, now that everyone got hooked on ad money and data mining.
The concern about the algo can clearly be mitigated. Eg here on HN there is no personalized feed concept, and that prevents one from entering a thought bubble.
It’s not completely free speech here, but seems close and mostly pretty good results follow.
> limits on the ability to get speech amplification
Well, you're the only person I've ever seen suggest that social media distribution be limited by author rather than viewpoint. Although I disagree, I'm not quite sure how that could be managed, either.
No, I refer to things like attaching counter opinions to opinions of people with high visibility for example. So if the concern is the power of the famous, never display their tweets alone, display it with a few other tweets.
Maybe do issue follow ups, so if someone says something and later it is contested prioritise the contestants until they get similar reach. For example, if a politician says he never met with someone and a photo of them together is revealed make sure that their claim is displayed together with the new photo.
The problem with fact checking is the presumption of authority over the truth. I don't suggest fact checking, I suggest equal exposure to contesting ideas.
I guess NASA tweets might receive pairs who claim that the Earth is not a globe :) That's OK, NASA can respond to these with equal visibility and if people are not convinced I guess NASA would need more convincing arguments.
All your "free thinkers" that are browsing these posts for 5 minutes while they take a dump won't be taken in by the mere stamp of authoritativeness on the fact-check posts, right? I mean, obviously all users are able to make good judgments and competently weigh all the facts on every topic. Why are you so worried? What makes a fact check post more authoritative than NASA?
Btw I'm not advocating for active suppression of ideas. I just understand if a particular company chooses to do it on their website. I'd do the same in their place. It's not their job to give everyone a voice.
I wasn't aware "many prominent people don't like fact-checking" was a statement that needed a citation. In any case, you're free to disagree with that. I don't really care enough to try to prove it to you.
Your own link says that nearly half of all Americans and 70% of Republicans think fact-checking is biased. That's the attitude I was referencing when I said that fact-checking is "widely heckled". If half of an audience boos you, that's a lot of booing.
I have no idea what you're arguing. Your own link says what I said.
I'm not saying anything about the fact-checking itself. I'm not on Twitter or Facebook. I haven't seen any fact-check posts. I'm sure they try their best to be accurate. I prefer to get my information about the most hoax-prone topics from authoritative sources - primary sources, news agencies, newspapers of record - the more boring, the better.
However, some sort of "fair & balanced" law would have to enforce this.
Edit: and to respond to sibling comment about fact-checking being heckled...
The mechanism here would have to somehow force a similar amount of views. For example, if a lie gets 1MM views, then the proof of the lie should have to gain 1MM views before the original author can gain leverage of the algorithm again.
Of course the new system will eventually be abused, however, it's a step in the right direction. And when that eventually fails to be recognizable, another set of checks and balances must be layered on top.
We had that in broadcasting; it was an FCC rule called the Fairness Doctrine. Reagan dismantled it, and that directly led to the extremist radio empires that fuel a lot of the misinformation online today.
Your last clause makes this beg the question, I think.
A lot of people believe their own views are dangerous for democracy, and limited to protect democracy. They just also don't believe in protecting democracy - sometimes explicitly, sometimes with lip service to a "democracy" that's little more than nationalism.
Outside of a few teenagers flirting with monarchism, the number of people who don't support democratic republics are vanishingly tiny enough that most references to them are actually straw man arguments.
Why do we need an absolute free speech platform? What good does it do?
> The only somewhat free place I've seen is 4Chan but it contains so much toxicity, that's its barely bearable.
Sounds like a hint to me. There are more free speech sites, e.g. saidit.net. I would wholeheartedly recommend staying away from it: it's a cesspool, like the other reddit wannabes. Voat also comes to mind. Freedom of speech on such sites only serves to say the worst of the worst, and that will predictably include escalating aggression towards other users.
> Why do we need an absolute free speech platform? What good does it do?
This is exactly the right question to ask. I'm convinced that it's not possible to have constructive "free speech" social media platform. There's always the need for moderation.
I agree, but I'd like to play with what "moderation" means. A great example of when moderation fails / is abused is Reddit, or the big socials like IG. The bots can be overly sensitive / have lots of false positives, and the individuals in charge of moderation are not accountable to anyone (except maybe advertisers, indirectly).
I would like to see a platform where moderation exists, but it's "opt-in" only. Meaning, the mods / bots can tag / categorize user posts, and other users can control the visibility of tagged material. This way everything -- the most vile, twisted, hateful and disturbing things are still permitted a place to exist, but they're effectively shadowbanned by individual choice. Start with some sane defaults, and allow people to peel back the lid on the box of horrors if they want to.
This could work with age-restrictions (users below a certain age cannot see certain tags) as well as satisfy advertisers that their ads are shown next to the most innoffensive, oatmeal-bland content (they choose tags next to which their ads are never shown).
I think moderation should be about the words that are being said, not the ideas that are being discussed.
A free speech platform should allow a wide range of topics, but it's not expected to stand for all manner of trolling and bad faith argumentation. I think that conflating the two is tripping a lot of people up in the debate about the topic.
In the end you end up with the same problem. All the "exterminate the jews" types go to the free speech platforms at which point everyone else leaves, even if the people with the ideas that aren't liked are using respectful language. It's not just the bad faith and trolling that make people want to leave the site, it's the base level ideas of the people who have been moderated off other platforms.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
I think that a platform where people expect the ugly ideas to be debated (in good faith) will have the users that are willing to do that[1].
Not every platform needs to have _all_ the users. I know that it's a bit of an anathema on a discussion board built by venture capitalists to say that the goal of a social platform should not be to maximize the amount of users and engagement, but here we are. I think optimizing your service for "everyone" is a bad strategy in competing with existing social networks, especially coming from an "indie" background. Not that Parler is exactly indie.
[1] I'm saying this as someone that is working towards a discussion platform that targets smallish to medium communities formed around a common interest. In this world if moms wanting to share their latest knitting project are excluded from a service that targets free speech people, that's fine, there can be a knitting community out there also for them. Having these two communities intermingle by using something like ActivityPub is a way to keep "the network effect" but keep them separate enough.
> I think that a platform where people expect the ugly ideas to be debated (in good faith) will have the users that are willing to do that[1].
This does not actually...happen. At least not over the medium and long term. What actually happens, and you can see this in practice, is that decent people are not particularly interested, over long periods of time, in arguing that no, there is no globalist (read: Jewish) conspiracy to take over the world. They lose interest almost immediately, while the frothers intellectually crossbreed and turn from one particular flavor of bigot into all the flavors of bigot.
The problem isn't, as you are characterizing, that a platform must have "all the users". The problem is that this strategy hyperconcentrates relatively anodyne conservatives into literal-not-figurative fascists, and has been doing so for quite a while. The active creation of intellectual cul-de-sacs, of epistemic closures for hateful beliefs, is a major factor in why we're where we are right now.
I disagree with you. I think that the phenomenon that you described (which exists on most social platforms that are advertising themselves as "free speech") is not present everywhere and my impression is that the problem is exactly with the "chase all the users" mentality.
One example that I can think of the top of my head is Scott Alexander's blog, where I saw opinions put forward (most of the times in a respectful manner) that ranged from extremely egalitarian to extremely libertarian. I am entirely sure that some of the people posting there have views that veer into "one flavour of bigot" or another, but because the community as a whole would rise against the most objectionable types of ideas that one could put forward, they never do it. To me that is a healthy community and I hope it can be achieved in other places without needing an "alpha-personality" at the center for people to gather around.
I personally would dismiss you as a lunatic and racist in both cases and move on with my day. However I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to make a fool of yourself if you so choose.
Making you feel like a martyr because you are being "censored" is worse in my opinion than allowing you to express your points of view and hopefully be receptive to counter arguments.
I think you're trivializing the issue quite a bit. But yes, I dislike the paternalism of considering everyone else on the internet stupid and incapable to making informed decisions when facing questionable points of view.
I'm not qualified to speak with any authority about this issue, but my opinion is that people that are willing to shoot other people most likely have other incentives than reading a singular's dude online hate ramblings. The problem lies with the fact that they gets ostracized and _all_ they are able to read are the hateful things. If you go through the thread above, you'll see that my stance is the complete opposite of that: let's allow people say the "bad" things and balance them out with other peoples' "good" things.
This theoretically would ensure that this person is not exposed to only hate and negativity, and will hopefully make a better decision than ending others' life and their own.
Forcing this unbalanced individual to retreat into a corner of the internet where his opinion on other people goes unchallenged is unquestionably A BAD THING, and I doubt I'll change my mind on this fact any time soon.
I will not change my mind about this one thing, but I change my mind all the time about other things when I'm being presented information that challenges my point of view. It's a bit childish to veer into ad-hominem and take my words out of context just to try and keep the upper hand. :P
they get arrested. The amount of violence that could be attributed to this sort of thing is so minuscule its barely a rounding error in overall figures. Just like school shootings it's extremely publicized but when it comes to the actual numbers it's nothing.
On another note I'd go as far as to say that prohibiting it will make them even more radical and entrenched in their beliefs, germany has extremely strict anti-nazi laws and yet never stopped having neo-nazis, much to the contrary[0]. The people who are going to go as far as real life actions will find the daily stormer or whatever other website and now he will feel like a martyr and justified of some conspiracy or whatever.
I disagree. There are limits to what ideas constitute free speech in many modern countries. As an extreme example, an idea that puts forward genocide as acceptable form of action should never be allowed under "free speech", even if it's said with nice words.
This and other examples are ruled under law in many developed countries.
Then it's not free speech. The whole point is that there are not restrictions. If it's restricted, it is by definition not free.
"Free speech" is a cool buzzword people think they can qualify for (or wish to), without the ramifications of true free speech (hurt feelings, bad ideologies being discussed in a positive light).
There are two definitions of free speech going around the internet discussion boards these days it seems. One is the legal one that has existed in our country since it was penned in the constitution, which protects you from government opression from publicly held opinions. That doesn't mean you can say whatever and expect no recourse from anyone, you have no protections from being kicked out of a private place or fired from your employer under this law, just that the State will not put you in jail or kill you over these words like other states around the world do for words. The other view is that you are allowed to say whatever you like on platforms like twitter and should not be banned. It has nothing to do with twitter. Twitter is not part of the State. People making it about twitter are missing the significance of the first amendment and what society looks like in places without protections on speech and religion from the State.
I'm not advocating for getting the government involved in forcing Twitter to allow all speech. I'm saying people need to stop continuing to use platforms that actively and publicly censor things on a daily basis, as if it's okay and normal now.
Fighting corporate-enacted censorship with government intervention is fighting fire with fire.
Freedom of speech is not a buzzword, it has a pretty good definition in the declaration of human rights and on Wikipedia:
> Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute, and common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, hate speech, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury.
The fact that most people on the internet (which seem to include you) are using it wrong is another thing. Free speech only applies in the relationship between citizens and the state. It has no meaning in the relationship between individuals and the platforms they're using for communication.
You're right. Companies have the right to censor things they don't like on their platforms. That's why people should stop using platforms that are frequently censored if they really care about "free speech." Just like how people can't "free loiter" on my personal property if I want them out of it.
I don't care about an arbitrary definition of two strung-together words, whose definitions individually, are absolute. When combined, their definition is just as absolute. The speech must be free. Free is simply defined as free. Not "free, but ..." in which case it is no longer just "free speech."
> I don't care about an arbitrary definition of two strung-together words, whose definitions individually, are absolute. When combined, their definition is just as absolute.
This feels like a deeper debate than I'm capable of having, but all language is a string of strung-together words with meanings. These meanings have reached a high enough degree of consensus to exist in a dictionary or semiotic treatise. I think that clinging to your own meaning of absolute free speech when faced with not an arbitrary definition, but one which was reached through a social and cultural consensus, is naive or willfully contrarian.
> Free speech only applies in the relationship between citizens and the state.
That is a pretty silly definition.
Imagine if a corporate owned mafia was going around murdering everyone who supports increasing taxes.
Surely, you would recognize that this has a chilling effect on speech, and could be said to control people's free speech rights, even though it is not the government doing it.
> an idea that puts forward genocide as acceptable form of action should never be allowed under "free speech"
See I have a problem with the word "never". How about "rarely" or at least "once". A terrible idea should be given an audience once. Let it it be quickly refuted, then go back to better conversations. If someone brings it up again, point them back to the earlier discussion. That way it is established why it is a bad idea.
In practice, almost never. Internet arguments seldom result in both sides agreeing on a single outcome. Nobody is convincing anyone else of anything on the internet (most of the time).
Sometimes. Threads are archived. Questions closed but not deleted. New questions/comments disallowed. It meets a middle ground between absolute free speech and absolute moderation.
Those developed countries have people taking their banned speech underground. It is usually also very illegal to take their strongest arguments and argue against them. All you have left is hope that they will never gain stronger support.
My words were "a wide range of topics" not "all the topics".
Personally I can think of a meaningful debate that can be had from talking about "genocide" but I'm pretty sure that people that would hold this opinion in truth are a little beyond what would be considered a "good faith" discussion.
A platform that hosted both objectionable speech and regular speech together might be tolerable to read. But the most of the regular speech ends up on popular platforms than ban objectionable speech, so the free-speech sites are left with mostly the objectionable stuff, which makes them pretty unpleasant to read.
It makes it hard to start a new platform. People start free-speech platforms with good intentions of having open debate about controversial topics. But they quickly get overrun by hate mongers and trolls, and become too noxious for most people to read. Intentional or not, it's a good strategy by the existing platforms to kick out the nasty people, ensuring that they're first to sign up for every new social network.
The hidden piece of the puzzle here is that objectionable speech pushes regular speech out.
Most users don't want to wade through toxicity to get to signal. If they're discussing a topic of interest, say baking, and someone comes in and starts ranting on how a vast global conspiracy made up of surprisingly-homogeneous ethnicity given its global scale is pushing up the price of yeast to weaken the market for white bread, either the moderators squelch that noise or people who want to talk about baking go somewhere else to do it.
Given their own freedom, when given a choice, users tend to select moderated channels over unmoderated ones. We've been doing the Internet long enough to know this to be true.
> Given their own freedom, when given a choice, users tend to select moderated channels over unmoderated ones. We've been doing the Internet long enough to know this to be true.
This is true, but unfortunately the same mistakes keep being made because people don't pay attention to the history of the internet or didn't grow up during that era. We've known that completely unfettered discussion leads to self destruction since the Usenet era. But the lessons aren't heeded or ignored, so we get people that either stay ignorant or learn the hard way.
4chan has hosted anything and has done so for longer than other social media sites.
Maybe toxic people just congregate in places where their speech is accepted, therefore making the rest of the site toxic as well.
Maybe it’s not “hate mongers and trolls” that overrun sites and that the concept of free speech and being able to say anything just naturally brings out the worst people and the worst in people.
When only the rejects use the sites of course it's going to be full of bad content. That doesn't mean there isn't value in free speech being better valued on mainstream platforms.
> “When only the rejects use the sites of course it's going to be full of bad content.”
The problem with this theory is that 4chan is older than both Twitter and Facebook.
If unmoderated speech created an inherently better platform, surely 4chan would have captured the market a long time ago and cut off commercial alternatives like Craigslist did.
Didn't 4chan start off largely as castaways from Something Awful? Your point is valid though. 4chan had an enormous amount of time to become the shining star of how great an absolute[1] free speech site could be, but still manages to be a cesspool. This should be a neon hint, but people keep thinking that they're going to invent the one free speech site that doesn't end up toxic.
1: Also as others point out, even 4chan moderates, however lightly.
Why are we here instead of 4chan? Why does everyone that uses email use a spam filter?
Direct, unfiltered exposure to the firehouse is at best banal, and at worst disgusting and self-destructive. It's an _awful_ job that ~no one would chose to do for themselves.
Yeah, it's 'my friends are here' and 'the content I want to read/interact with is here'.
It's the same reason people haven't mass switched to Mastodon or other Fediverse services; because the userbase is so much smaller than the likes of Twitter that there's a good chance the people and content they care about isn't available there. Or why so many competitors to popular services fail in general, regardless of their stance on free speech. The network effect is strong, and sometimes even billions of dollars and tons of marketing can't overcome that (see Google+ for example).
Would people prefer a free speech orientated alternative? Hard to say, for the same reason as whether they'd prefer a decentralised or federated one; it's the content and users that bring people to a site or service, and the competitors to the popular ones are so much smaller and less active it isn't much of a comparison.
I think the problem lies in the impunity, not in the free speech itself. IMHO people should be allowed to say everything but they must accumulate the reputation for saying it.
If someone is a racist bigot, they shouldn't be physically restrained(deleting posts is like physically covering someones' mouth) from being bigots but they should definitely be known for it. Then it's up to the community to decide how to interact with those people. That's how we do it in real life and works pretty well.
Another thing is the amplification: people pretending to be multiple people. This is also an issue, giving wrong impression about the state of the society and must be solved.
Lastly, we need some kind of spread management. We have the problem of BS getting huge traction and the correction getting no traction. Maybe everyone exposed to something should be re-exposed to the theme once there's a new development. For example, when people share someone's photo as a suspect and it turns out that the person in the photo is not the suspect, the platform can say "remember this Tweet? Yeah, there are some doubts about it. Just letting you know". The implementation of it wouldn't need a ministry of truth but an algo to track theme developments.
IMHO if Musk manages to solve these few problems, which I think he can, a free speech social media is possible.
Please, deleting a tweet is hardly being 'physically restrained'
> Than it's up to the community to decide how t interact with those people.
Twitter is a private company, and it chooses to run it's service how it wants. The government avoids actually physically restraining racist bigots, and lets the community decide how to deal and interact with those people. Some may chose to harbor them (Parlor, 4chan, etc), and others (like twitter) may opt to not host them.
It's not a huge social injustice if you're not allowed to tweet. Feel free to go to one of the millions of other websites, or your start your own (it's easier to do this than ever!) and see who's interested in what you have to say.
> Maybe everyone exposed to something should be re-exposed to the theme once there's a new development.
I don't accept that content deletion is a way to go. When an offensive content is deleted we lose the ability to jude it for urselves. The content must remain but be strictly attached to a persona so the persona can be "judged" rightfully. In real life, when we deal with these people we want to know what they did. It gives fidelity, unlike "the person said something that violates rule 4 section 3". We should stop pretending that we are not humans and embrace the human ways of dealing with human problems. There's nothing human in undoing speech.
And no, attaching follow up to organic content is not moderation.
I don’t see any value in spending my time judging content saying that trans people are degenerates or that black people are an inferior race. I’ve already judged those ideas in my life and don’t need to see them anymore.
Well you can judge people that say those things as people who don't deserve your respect and attention. Then don't hang around places that interact with those people, that's how we do it in real life.
In an online world with no moderation it is impossible to not hang around places with these people. They can just show up unannounced to spew hate speech wherever they want.
In real life, unless you’re recorded, there isn’t a record of what you say. Moreover, people who do hear first hand what you say will recall different aspects and also forget detail over time.
This allows people to evolve and to not be beholden to something they said/thought a decade ago and no longer think.
How do you feel about HN's approach - flagged or heavily downvoted comments are invisible if you are not logged in or if you have not changed "showdead" from the default unchecked state (at which point they're rendered in a hard-to-read colour)?
I'm not the person you're responding to, but I myself prefer giving the users the moderation tools that affect only their view of the content. Users trying to save other users from posts they personally disagree with, in my opinion, can lead to echo chambers just by itself. Let me configure my account so that I can block or mute specific users or highlight keywords I can add to a list or allow users to tag posts. That way others can express their opinions in more ways than just commenting and I can use that data to determine if I want to read the existing comments or not.
I do think HN is one of the better moderation systems since this is one of the saner places on the internet and you can still configure things so you can at least see all the content, though you can't interact with it all. I would just prefer it if I was in charge of saving myself from bad opinions or whatever motivates people to down vote posts into oblivion.
I don't like it when it's due to low score, it is an oppression of unpopular opinions.
I like it when it's about flagged posts. I have the option enabled to show these posts and I would vouch if there's something worthy in it. So spam and other BS is "removed" but I still can take a look at it and see it for myself.
Overall, I think HN is one of the best moderated online places.
So this is unusual to me, because flagging feels more open to abuse than the comment score. Indeed this very thing happened to me recently:
- user A says vaguely racist thing
- user B calls person out for racist thing
- user A cannot downvote a reply, so they flag it instead - making it disappear
So both can silence someone, but in one case many people need to disagree with someone and in the other you just need one person (or one person with an alt account if you want to go and revert a "vouch"). So if anything flagging is more prone to abuse than downvoting. I try to read greytext comments when I can and vouch whenever it looks unjust (and do something similar for downvoted posts) but from the looks of things not many people do.
So I'd understand if I was downvoted and called out for my confrontational response to racism. Because at that point I'd reply that actually treating this kind of casual xenophobic comment as unserious and mocking the person is the most effective counter to this kind of behavious. Getting bogged down in debating the merits or worth of any individual person or where they might "belong" is exactly what this kind of person wants to do.
That's where you judge the moderation. The moderation quality defines the community quality.
The good thing about HN is that the moderators are reachable and they do respond intelligently. Unlike AI moderation, you can send an e-mail about it and dang will respond to you and explain why something happen and you can discuss it.
I had my account restricted multiple times and restored once we got on the same page(I don't agree with everything but once I see their point, I can work with it). I had wrongfully flagged comments unflagged by sending them an e-mail too.
It's not perfect but it's pretty good and miles ahead than anything else online.
So in my case the comment didn't desperately need unflagging - someone could wave the comment guidelines in my face and I'd probably concede that such an open confrontation broke at least one. But yeah I guess you can overturn a flagging more easily than being downvoted.
The real key is that there's a moderator, and the community is small enough that he can check things manually.
Once it gets too big for that, you're doomed to destruction eventually.
My preferred solution would be to break up the communities once they're too big, instead of trying to make a massive world-wide community like Twitter does. Reddit somewhat has this, but there is still a site-wide issue.
>Once it gets too big for that, you're doomed to destruction eventually.
>My preferred solution would be to break up the communities once they're too big, instead of trying to make a massive world-wide community like Twitter does.
I agree with this. In real life situations you can see it too, the larger the crowd the stupider their total behaviour becomes. Large crowds are good for certain things though, but mostly primal stuff like singing and chanting.
> Maybe everyone exposed to something should be re-exposed to the theme once there's a new development.
This doesn't work. Show people two articles, one that is false and one that is true, and most people will say the one that aligns with their priors is true. We need to either teach people to recognize fake news, censor fake news, or accept that basically everyone will believe false propaganda. There are no other options. Once someone has been shown an article they agree with telling them the article was false just leads them to think you're on "the other side".
If you took perfectly rational people and ran the same test, you'd get the same result. Evidence that supports a position that you already have evidence for is more likely to be true. If someone showed me very compelling evidence that the world was flat, even if I was unable to find any issue with it, I still would believe that it is false. If a single counterpoint could change your belief, you never had any business claiming it as a belief in the first place.
Do you have cause to believe that repeated exposure to every side of every story won't lead the average person towards truth?
And who is going to decide what those "fake news" are to censor and how will you assume they won't fall into the exact same trap of wanting to believe in what they already agree with.
We're hot off the heels of hunter biden, surely that should be a wakeup call regarding how "misinformation experts" go both ways.
No clue. All I know is that if we don't censor fake news people will believe it, no matter how much evidence to the contrary they are shown. Maybe we just have to accept that.
> Another thing is the amplification: people pretending to be multiple people.
For a free speech absolutist curtailing this could also be seen as removing free speech.
> Lastly, we need some kind of spread management. We have the problem of BS getting huge traction and the correction getting no traction. Maybe everyone exposed to something should be re-exposed to the theme once there's a new development. For example, when people share someone's photo as a suspect and it turns out that the person in the photo is not the suspect, the platform can say "remember this Tweet? Yeah, there are some doubts about it. Just letting you know". The implementation of it wouldn't need a ministry of truth but a algo to track theme developments.
Still this wouldn't solve the issue with spread of BS, specially targeted BS: it is tailored to invoke and reinforce inherent biases and, on average, someone exposed to it will become less inclined to read/critically judge any rebuttal. Bullshit spreads much easier than well researched rebuttals, just by the nature of bullshit. It's a game where truth is bound to lose, no matter how many "algorithms" you implement to spread developments of a story to the same audience, the engagement of said audience to the rebuttals will vary depending on their biases. I'm not even including the required inherent drive and energy to actually follow-up, as an audience, on further developments, in the fast-paced world of social media people will selectively choose what to invest their energy into. Someone falling for bullshits won't want their effort to be thrown out by rebuttals and so will avoid such activities perceived as a waste of energy, after you formed an opinion it's much harder to un-form it.
I'm strictly in the camp that absolute free speech on social media is a fool's errand, at least in 2022. There is no upside to the massive downsides that we already see and experience, even in the scope of not existing with absolute free speech.
The detachment on social media between the written words vs the real humans behind those words causes a non-insignificant amount of grief that wouldn't happen in a in-person interaction. It seems that we humans easily lose our humanity when not in a real world social environment, the vileness is exaggerated while empathy is easily pushed aside.
I agree that we can't have a perfect solution but let's loose a good solution in the pursuit of a perfect one and I think there can be a good solution by implementing some of the real world social dynamics into the virtual one.
Jerks and BS artist are nothing new but in real world we do have some tools to deal with them. IMHO, changing how some things work can create an atmosphere of healthy interactions.
Agree. The big one you missed is identity. Most hate is anonymous. Being able to filter by tags like “known racist” or whatever, and seeing someone’s history of sharing misinformation is useful but most people would self-censor if their identity was known or other users would filter out those that won’t identify.
What I wonder is what Musk will do if he finds out the scales are artificially weighted towards conservative content. Like if conservative content is artificially boosted by bots and algorithms. Facebook was much more liberal before thumbs were put on the scale. I don’t remember when but I think it was Mother Jones that saw huge traffic movement changes after algo changes like a decade ago?
Like what if the natural state of humanity is much more liberal than the American media and social media allow for? Will Musk allow that or will he see anything that doesn’t align with his views as error or manipulation?
What if a truly free and transparent self-moderating platform naturally promotes leftism more than a moderated but manipulated feed does?
A study showed that people are more aggressive online when using their real name
> Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.
Weird but I still think Elon’s idea of needing confirmed identity for a checkmark is solid. If anonymous users then are nicer than checkmarked users, I guess the filter will work in reverse? The elimination of bots will be nice if they can do it.
> Generally, if your solution is virtually indistinguishable from one of the systems the Chines government is using to keep people in line, your solution is bad.
That’s an opinion. I disagree with it. It’s a private corporation not the government.
You either have people incentivized to self-identify with a checkmark or what? The alternative is to build an AI that identifies you in order to remove bots? I don’t even think that’s possible without it auto removing everyone that uses anonymizing tools like Tor?
How do you know that requiring identity is anti free speech? Not everyone online is Iranian political dissident. Sure, some people claim that you can't have free speech when your identity is known but I don't see any solid reasoning behind it.
Mike Masnick in his tweets repeats some talking points but there's no cohesive argument.
And AFAIK an anonymous political dissident wouldn’t want a blue checkmark?
Furthermore, there can be layers of anonymity. There can be anonymous publicly but not to Twitter. That’s dangerous given that Twitter cannot protect your identity from a state actor accessing its internal systems. Thus, again, why would you want a checkmark as a dissident.
Requiring ID verification is adding limitations on who you permit to speak. It is inherently anti 'free speech'. I think it's fine if that's the sort of website you want to build (twitter at the moment is not a free speech maximalist), but don't pretend that doing this doesn't limit speech.
> Requiring ID verification is adding limitations on who you permit to speak
Do you mean that in countries where not everyone has government ID? That's not an issue, the government doesn't have to be the authority of ID. Besides, governments can create fake IDs for covert operations anyway. I don't suggest that everyone should connect to the internet with government issued ID card.
How do you verify someone's IRL identity without a government issued ID card in a scalable way?
I don't mean some idea that could work at some arbitrary point in the future (decentralized whatever...). If a social media platform were to do this, right now, how would they do it without verifying a government issued ID?
Identity doesn't come into existence with the registration with a government, it's something you build over time as you interact with the world around you.
Nicknames are an identity and it's pretty much common these days to have nicknamed account on all over the internet. The problem with these is that one can have multiple of those and a behaviour in one place doesn't transfer into other places.
So maybe we can have across-the-internet identities. You are jasonshaev but who you are on twitter? on reddit? on other places? Once you become the person who is known around everywhere the same way, you have the identity that you would like to protect. You can't troll one place when bored then be known as a nice person somewhere else. I think that's good enough identity. The implementation can be around crypto, single sign in, face recognition etc.
The thread started with "real name." The only way to verify that is government identity.
If you want to verify some other, "online" identity, that's fine, but I don't see how that would meaningfully affect anyones behavior. To be clear, I don't think verifying someone's real name will meaningfully improve online behavior either -- plenty of other threads explain why. In which case, what's the point of either?
You never know where the prevailing winds of online sentiment will turn next. Having your every post tagged with your identity can lead to real-life problems in the future, even if it was something edgy you said as a teenager or something you used to believe but don't any longer.
> You never know where the prevailing winds of online sentiment will turn next. Having your every post tagged with your identity can lead to real-life problems in the future, even if it was something edgy you said as a teenager or something you used to believe but don't any longer.
So maybe, for every single thought one has, one ought not fly around the world and post it on a flyer on every street corner and light post. Which is basically what posting on Twitter is.
But then I think a ton of stuff people casually do online is batshit crazy when you put it in real-world terms. Of course you wouldn't do the above. You wouldn't even do it if you had a magic button that could make it happen for you without taking time & money to go do it in person. "Post my random toilet thought on hundreds of millions of surfaces all over the world? No, god, why would I do that?"
Would you give a teenager access to such a magic button? Of course not. That would be entirely insane. Even if using the button would not, per se, get them in trouble, you'd destroy that thing or put it in a safe. Handing it over to them to do with as they please wouldn't even be something you'd consider doing.
But we live in a world where ~every developed-world kid has a button like that by age 12, and sometimes much earlier. WT actual F. Of course it's causing tons of problems. Most adults couldn't be trusted to make good choices with such a tool (clearly).
Wouldn't self censor solve the problems just as well as deleting content?
See, because we don't say everything that comes to our mind, we are able to interact in a civil manner with people that can have any kind of opinions. In real life, I'm sometimes shocked that someone is a total bigot.
However, when civility is established we can discuss these ideas too and instead of having these people being toxic these ideas can be expressed in a civil manner and discussed. Maybe they have a point sometimes? If they do, it can be dully noted and if they don't they will be exposed to the counter arguments. Also, when ideas are expressed in civil manners, people don't label other people straight as "bigot", "racists" and accept the nuances. In fact, some prominent right-wing people are doing that, people like Jordan Peterson. Because the guy is civil, he is effective and it's up to the rest to contradict his claims in civil manners.
So yes, it is alright to have some self restraint and think before you speak. It's definitely much better than oppressing it.
edit: the comment I responded was a bit different, I guess the OP added more thoughts.
> Why do we need an absolute free speech platform? What good does it do?
I think the better question is, what harm does not having a free speech platform do? I think the answer is fairly evident when you look at how the ability to control speech has been used throughout history. The justification, I would also suggest, has always been the same as the ones being advanced now. People act like it was social media that revealed the fact that the masses will say terrible things when allowed, but in fact that was the common opinion for most of history.
We have a free speech platform though. Practically everyone has decided not to use it. I think the echo chamber that self selecting which moderators you want has created huge problems, but we can't force people to use 4chan when they don't want to.
I think you misunderstand my position. I'm not saying twitter should be unmoderated, I'm responding to the question as to why free speech is important. I would say that the internet itself is a free speech platform, and that's a very good thing. I'm perfectly content to let people converse under whatever rules they choose as long as there is choice.
I will say in regard to twitter though that excessive policing of speech creates a segregation of audiences and consequently increases echo chambers, which is probably not what those speech police were trying to accomplish. I think it would be healthier for society if it were a little more tolerant, but that's not really related to my position on free speech.
But Musk doesn't want a platform for "free speech" - he wants a platform where guys like him can do or say what they like without repercussions, but where he can crack down on anyone he doesn't like.
Like it or not Twitter is about as good a compromise as you're going to get. The "free speech" places like Truth Social and Gab will happily boot you off if they don't like you. Twitter have a TOS where they are very forgiving - for the most part issuing suspensions for violations and allowing you to delete TOS-breaking tweets rather than banning you. The line for Twitter seems to be when there is actual real-world harm that can be directly attributed to your actions on the platform. So if you're getting banned from Twitter you need to have fucked up big time
Assuming the user's comment meets the legal definition of 1A speech and is not porn, if you can show me a single instance where anyone that posted a comment that was either removed or censored in some way by anyone with access at Gab, I will personally send you USD $50 in crypto at any address you specify in the comment, after I corroborate your example/evidence with Gab's management.
I've been on Gab since its inception - the only type of comments/users that get booted are those who engage in illegal speech. Illegal speech != distasteful/hateful/politically-charged/racist/sexist/divisive/etc.
Is hate speech right? In most cases, probably not unless you're saying things like "f..k all pedophiles who rape children", then it's righteously motivated. Is it legal? Yes. This is a very important distinction and what gives the USA its unique character and distinguishing trait among ALL other nations who do not have these types of freedoms codified in their constitutions...in fact, in many countries you'd be sacked quietly for saying the "wrong" thing - where "wrong" is defined by whomever happens to be in power (e.g. Russia, China come to mind)
User 3 in this article was banned for "spam" which as far as I am aware is not illegal. Gizmodo received a response from Gab saying "spam is not free speech."
Also, HN user encryptluks2 says he was banned "for making a post asking how are all the domestic terrorists Trump supporters doing after the capitol riot." They may be able to give you the info to verify.
Also, any form of sexual content is banned on gab which is also generally protected free speech. I'm not aware of anyone having been banned for it but I'm sure they are out there, and if not it is easy enough to test.
I can't message that guy directly nor can I reply to his comment to ask for more info. That kind of speech definitely falls into legal 1A speech. It also seemed like he was baiting - which is as you pointed out, not illegal speech.
I'd also like you to consider another possibility - people on the internet lie and distort the truth. A lot. Eg. he may have gotten banned, but not for what he says here on HN. Or he may not have been banned at all but knows he'll get upvotes on HN if he bashes Gab, which was initially backed by YCombinator....until it wasn't. I'll let you figure out why they stopped supporting them.
Didn't peg Australia for a repressive country/government. If this is really the case, meaning, laws are codified against "hate speech", it's pretty much the beginning of the end of them, IMHO. Free expression should be as close to absolute as possible, everywhere....
It tells me there's places of free speech on the internet but what is really wanted here is forced listening.
Free speech on small fringe sites somehow doesn't count because it's not forced on people that don't want to see it. It's pretty clearly not a free speech issue at this point.
Exactly. And they do not understand that with free speech does not come freedom from consequences.
There are plenty of places with free speech. You can walk outside and start saying some pretty insane stuff right now and people may hate you (consequence) but you are unlikely to have any type of legal consequence.
The social media one gets me the most because even if you do get rid of all moderation it is no secret that there is some algo out there amplifying some voices and not others. And in a way that is just censorship with extra steps.
I get unreasonably irked when some subreddit won't let me post a comment / removes a comment. Like, "who do you think you are to limit my ability to express myself here?!" Deprived of context, my contribution is meaningless -- so, how does that interact with the freedom of speech, really?
Say I'm in a crowded square where people are arguing about squids, and I have a squid-related revelation I'd like to share, but the self-appointed Guardians of the Square have gagged me. Is this an infringement on free speech? I'm free to leave the square and speak -- but what I have to say is relevant within the confines of the square, not elsewhere.
I believe that there is a time, a place, and a proper amount of just about everything, including toxicity. People who wish to interact with 4Chan and its culture need to understand what it really is. The anonymity affords unfiltered reaction and you should never expect your posts to be treated with the kind of social norms that non-anonymous and pseudo-anonymous platforms provide. While the default experience is to have your posts largely ignored, if you actually want honest and unvarnished opinions on your idea then 4Chan is the place to solicit it. As long as people go in with the understanding that nothing posted there should ever be taken seriously and that it functions as counter-cultural catharsis, the perceived toxicity becomes a feature, not a bug.
> The only somewhat free place I've seen is 4Chan but it contains so much toxicity, that's its barely bearable.
Here, you've solved it. "The free market", both users and advertisers, demand content moderation. If you want to attract users, you need a website that isn't a cesspool of 'toxicity'. If you don't want to drive away those who actually pay for your website (advertisers), you'll need to moderate.
Reddit has proved this out - they started out trying to say they're hands off, and they'll only remove illegal content (ignoring how troublesome that is to define for a global website), and they've slowly learned over the years that they cannot grow their website with those policies.
You could say that you don't want to grow your platform, and stay a small niche, which is totally fine. That's what gab and parlor and 4chan are. We have them already!
that falls under illegal content in the US which they never didn't remove. Maybe not piracy but there's plenty of piracy subreddits last I checked. What made them start changing things iirc was the backlash over the Icloud(?) celebrity nude leaks.
> Musk and everyone else is right that we do need a platform with free speech. The only problem is that all those free speech advocates are actually NIMBY's when it comes to free speech.
Agreed. Truth Social/Parlor as "Free speech" spaces is 100% laughable.
> The only somewhat free place I've seen is 4Chan but it contains so much toxicity, that's its barely bearable.
AKA: Every totally-free-no-holds-barred-speech sites, there is a reason it's a stupid goal held by people either too naive or those using it as a dog whistle.
> Yet again, I like that Musk and Kanye kind of people claim that they want free speech because at least we can hold them responsible when they don't deliver it.
Yes, because we have such a good track record of holding liars accountable...
> This is in contrast with the pure fascist where they cannot be held responsible for anything because they don't claim virtue in first place.
I can't even with this line. We have plenty of fascists running around claiming mountains of virtue and lying through their teeth. Their base/audience continues to blindly follow them and holding any of them accountable (especially by their base) is a pipe dream.
> It's a bit like companies doing greenwashing, which can be exposed when they don't deliver on their claimed virtues versus companies who don't even claim such virtues and instead pretend that it doesn't matter.
Again, this just isn't happening at scale.
> Those who claim virtue are better even if they ultimately fail.
Absolute free speech and anonymity is a toxic combination.
Free speech in the way it was envisaged in the constitution presumes there is a feedback loop back to the emitter of the speech. Anonymity breaks that feedback loop. Anyone who tells you that free speech without consequences has ever existed pretty much anywhere is lying to themselves and to you.
If you want anonymity you need some measure of bounds on speech in those places.
Counterpoint to your anonymity argument: we’ve learned in that past few years that people are very much OK with being publicly identified with hateful ideologies/ideas, e.g. MAGA supporters. A lot of them publicly post and participate online under their real identities, a lot of of it on Facebook.
Anonymity is only a deterrent when you are the odd one out. When the President of the US is the one spouting the insanity you don't have to hide anymore.
> Anonymity is only a deterrent when you are the odd one out. When the President of the US is the one spouting the insanity you don't have to hide anymore.
The problem with anonymous online echo-chambers is that it lulls those in the community that there are more of them in the real world than there really are, which emboldens people to take their online craziness into the real world. This goes for everything from politics to "The raid on Area 51"
That sounds like a cyber safety issue more so than a problem with anonymity. Remember all those lessons about not sharing your real address or name online? Add another caveat that the two idiots fighting may, in fact, be the same person putting on a show. In fact, the crowd cheering them on is also half-composed of the same guy (the other half is organic popcorn-watching).
Mass shooter manifestoes have cited both 4chan posts and named newspaper, TV and radio personalities. People are quite capable of being terrible under their own names.
Exactly. Personally I’d rather see more of internet communities/products regulating access to anonymity. This opinion is intensely unpopular around here, but IMO it addresses the root cause. The internet made it instantly easy and cheap to have multiple identities. Don’t get me wrong, we still need that tool in a modern human’s toolset, but it shouldn’t be cheap and easy to generate low value spam. Imagine if Twitter had a community reputation system and Twitter itself never removed any Tweets but just let the community downvote them into nonexistence, like we do here…
Community reputation (mostly) works the same as a lack of anonymity, it means your actions are tied to your account (in re twitter) and some extent to your pseudonym.
I'm a furry, furry is a community built around an isolation between our IRL identity and our online one. But the community is tight knit enough that your reputation will follow you around - the identity you created for yourself yes - but still your identity, and if you're too far out of bounds, you get quietly (or loudly) excluded from the mainstream of the community. It largely functions the same way as tying your real name to every online identity.
Now take something like twitter - you start with a karma of say 75, anything less than 100 karma, and your tweets wont show up in searches, anything less than 50 and you start to disappear from timeline - even for followers, anything less than 30, you disappear from lists - effectively this creates an automatic shadow banning system.
But a saving grace, you earn a quarter point of karma just by not having any negative interactions on the site, you could also earn positive karma by upvotes on content.
You could also put some other bounds in there too, like limiting how much positive karma or negative karma a single post could earn, to prevent it from skewing the numbers too much (it should be based on a weighted average of interactions, not just on one tweet that goes viral and the rest of it is low effort shitposting).
Ideally you'd have a cross site 'identity' service that would also carry along a weighted karma score from all of the places you interact, and allow people to see those links - you're still abstracted from your real identity, and you're always welcome to start over again, abandon your account and start from zero, but there is persistent history of your interactions.
We don't need a free speech platform. People need a choice as to how the content they see is moderated. That's what forums used to do, until we collectively decided to just put all the forums on Facebook or Twitter rather than having separate forums for each interest.
Everyone thinking "we need free speech on Twitter" has lost the plot, and, as you mentioned, the revealed preference of people who claim they want free speech is actually toward heavier moderation (but moderation they like).
Most of them go on Twitter for one kind of content, and on Parler or "Truth" Social for another kind, and they don't really want the streams to cross. We used to have this in the 90's and early 2000's. The question is how to get it back.
How about we just go back to not using one big central social communication platform and go back to the spirit of using separate independently owned forums, chatrooms and websites for our little niches and communities to prevent this issue.
Why are we concerned with people saying horrible things per se, and not with the fact that the horrible things are amplified on a Twitter platform? In the conversation above, the smaller forums idea lets people go where they want. If you wander into an offensive place and you get offended, that becomes on-you, and then we do away with the complaint about Twitter promoting the bad and people getting offended inadvertently.
The idea of chasing after evil ideas is flawed from the outset.
It's not new, either, which is why this very long hacker news thread bothers me. I usually like to wade on on these topics more extensively, but here the entirety of the population is applauding free speech being a shitty idea, without any historical conversation.
Oh and it's incredibly US centric. Freedom of speech is a principle that was discussed in the Enlightenment and beyond, and fought for (first against religious authorities in ancient times, then against religious authorities in the 20th century). It happens to exist in the 1st amendment as a government limitation, but as a principle and a moral it is well beyond that.
"How about we just go back to not using one big central social communication platform and go back to the spirit of using separate independently owned forums, chatrooms and websites for our little niches and communities to prevent this issue"
Regardless of what the issue is how would being on a smaller forum prevent this?
And? People are allowed to say horrible things. I can join the forum with none of the stuff I deem "horrible", you join the forum with none of the stuff you deem "horrible", everybody is happy!
The tragedy of the commons happened. The old situation had a few fatal flaws (mostly discoverability) that meant that new entrants could take almost all the oxygen out of forums by having a weird form of "mass appeal." It worked for a while, but the cracks are starting to show.
Unfortunately, I doubt that we can put the cat back in the bag.
Twitter et al should allow users to choose their own third-party moderators and feed sort. Kind of like choosing your preferred ad blocker. That way everyone can see their preferred curation.
You're basically looking for people like Stallman, who is a very rare kind of person. He thinks about the principles he would like to advocate for and then he fleshes out how these principles interact and how to deal with tensions or contradictions.
Most people who declare their affinity for a value or policy or position merely do so tactically; they think that there's a short-term relationship between the furthering of some movement and their ability to get closer to what they want. Such people are allies when convenient.
> Yet again, I like that Musk and Kanye kind of people claim that they want free speech because at least we can hold them responsible when they don't deliver it.
Really? They've never defined free speech, so how can we hold them accountable?
The idea of a "free speech absolutist" is a complete joke destined for legal consequences. For example, I don't think they mean free speech is the ability to post obscene content, threats, state secrets, corporate IP, or any other legal restrictions on free speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
Plus, there are all kinds of free speech reductions they could make, like only allowing palatable content onto top trending recommendations. So, you're not banning free speech, but you're actively restricting it based on what's attractive to advertisers or even the general public.
If they said "all legally permitted speech on our platform will be given the same protection and visibility based on metrics that do no include the meaning of the speech", then that would be something concrete that we could hold them accountable to.
> the ability to post obscene content, threats, state secrets, corporate IP, or any other legal restrictions
Free speech opponents always like to point to these examples when the topic of free speech comes up, but I've never seen free speech advocates use an example of any of these as examples of problematic censorship - instead, they (we) point out voluminous examples of unfashionable opinions being removed. In fact, if Kanye or Musk came out and said "free speech except for" and listed your (specific, easily definable) examples, I'd still agree with them that they were advocating for free speech.
These are all grey areas that are constantly being tested and censored to varying degrees on multiple Social Media platforms. Trump was banned from Twitter because of “the risk of further incitement of violence” after Jan. 6. So it's very much at the crux of the issue on the debate whether or not Trump's speech on Twitter should have been protected by the platform or not, which is what really catalyzed Parler and Truth Social's branding in the market place as "pro- free speech".
> The only problem is that all those free speech advocates are actually NIMBY's when it comes to free speech
It's unclear from your comment. Are you saying that Musk and West are our free speech champions and everybody else is a poser?
Because Musk and West do not care about free speech either. It's the problem these rich idiots all claim to have: "I need a platform where my voice can be heard," while their voice already gets top spot on the trending Twitter page and on newspaper front pages.
I don't like how "I'm a free speech absolutist" has become "I want to force you to read my toxic rants, even when you try to get away from me." You yourself say 4chan is "barely bearable."
What free speech has meant historically is "I don't believe the government should be able to criminalize certain kinds of speech." It never meant "I am entitled to insert garbage into someone else's newspaper or book" until people started misappropriating the term.
What exactly is the difference, again? A block button is prone to breaking thru numerical power. If enough people are responding to you and or harassing you there is no manageable way to block all of them, especially without first passively engaging with their posts in the first place.
So instead people build addons and blocklists to manage all of that for them. Now you have a separate centralized platform for dealing with a certain subset of users.
And if that doesn't work or if they don't want to put in that effort they just leave the platform instead. They go to somewhere else where the social agreement with the platform is to automatically filter out or remove those users. Hence why few people actually use the free speech platforms like Gab, Parker etc.
Think about 2 situations. Person A, wants to see the content of Person B. So person A voluntarily chooses to see the content.
And the other situation is Person C, does not want to see the content of person B, so chooses not to do so.
> there is no manageable way to block all of them
Yes there is. Someone could choose to allow an automated method of blocking people that they don't want to see.
As long as nobody is forced to use this automated moderation, or can change it, while still having access to that platform, then it is fine.
> Now you have a separate centralized platform for dealing with a certain subset of users.
No actually, it is quite a bit different. The difference being that a person could chose to modify this blocking authority. It is all fine and well to have blocking authorities, as long as I, the user can turn it off, if I choose to do so, on that platform, or otherwise modify my own blocklist, or add a white list.
So that is the solution. Feel free to have blocklists. Just let me change the blocklist, for myself, if I disagree with it.
>...Instead, what they don't want, is a centralized platform preventing consenting parties from engaging with each other
Who doesn't want that? The billions of people that interact with Twitter and Facebook, or the people who are sympathetic to the fringe racist beliefs that dominate "free speech" sites?
This is a weird take. Most folks are old enough to remember the pre trump-era internet and society where alternating views were allowed and engaged with as opposed to leading to bans and social cancellation. Conflating that with allowing people to shove views in your face is odd, your ability to tune out is distinctly different from one’s ability to broadcast.
We have a platform with free speech: your own website! I don't get why these personalities who are charging this free speech narrative don't just decamp with their massive following to their own website. It's like arguing a bar has no right to kick out a drunk and disorderly person, because "free speech." Sorry, people can kick you out of the place they own, if you don't like that then start up your own bar/twitter/etc.
> at least we can hold them responsible when they don't deliver it. This is in contrast with the pure fascist where they cannot be held responsible for anything because they don't claim virtue in first place.
What's the plan to do that when they censor all dissent on the platforms they just bought?
Then do what Gab, Gettr and Truth Social did and 'build your own platform'. If not that, then use a Mastodon instance like mastodon.social as an alternative?
The only thing these networks censor is anything that is illegal in their hosted jurisdiction i.e the US.
The fediverse (network of activitypub servers, including mastodon) itself doesn't censor anything at all, but if you don't moderate your instance then other instances might decide to stop federating with you to protect their users.
As far as I understood, they're not doing that on a case-by-case basis, but are using centralized block-lists (which every admin can choose to follow automatically). That's a step up from raw centralized censorship, but it's not a big step.
Most admins AFAIK don't have centralized blocklists but when the new bad instances pop up there tend to be #fediblock posts pretty fast, and they get shared pretty widely.
> The only somewhat free place I've seen is 4Chan but it contains so much toxicity, that's its barely bearable.
Almost as if allowing absolute free speech has consequences, almost as if there was a reason absolute free speech isn't a thing anywhere in the world... we might be onto something
Okay I'm going to try and engage in a good faith reply here:
"Free speech absolutist" does not mean "absolute free speech", you're misunderstanding the premise here. The term does not mean that anyone should be allowed to say anything they want at any time.
The phrase means that we should permit any LEGAL speech. Where "legal" has tons of historical precedent and can be decided by the country.
We've seen time and again, that if the ability to speak freely isn't a priority, then censorship grows quickly. If you don't believe that there is a ton of censorship happening on these platforms with a specific set of biases (the biases that the employees of these companies carry) then I would say that you might not be viewing the situation with an open mind.
This is becoming a problem because the Internet has become the new town square where people learn what's going on in the world and talk with each other. If the people running these platforms are allowed to suppress speech that they don't like and promote speech that they do like, then they wield an incredible amount of power. This power is rife for abuse, both by people inside the corporation and within government.
You are correct though that 4chan is a gross cesspool, though its one I believe should be allowed to exist simply because I believe freedom of speech is important. The problem with that site is obviously that it's anonymous. Coupling anonymity with free speech is a recipe for bringing out the worst in people, but a system where peoples' identities are out in the open and where they can speak freely is good in my opinion. We need more free speech and we need to engage with our fellow countrymen and find common cause, otherwise this insanely polarized partisan situation will continue to get worse.
> The only somewhat free place I've seen is 4Chan but it contains so much toxicity, that's its barely bearable.
I’d argue that every place that allows every kind of speech without restriction will eventually degenerate into a cesspit. You lose the reasonable people quickly because they don’t want to deal with the toxicity and it’s all downhill from there.
> The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
I think the main thing that would help there wouldn't be to force any particular platform to allow all speech, but to make it so anyone who wanted to set up such a site or platform could do so without fear of being bullied off the internet by an angry mob or moral puritanism. Web hosting services, firewall services like Cloudflare, payment processers like Visa and Mastercard and internet providers should be regulated as utilities like water and electric companies are.
If that was done, then there would be far less issues here. Those who want free speech focused platforms could create them, and those who didn't want to use them wouldn't have to. The problem at the moment is that not only is there no place for free speech online, but any attempts at creating one can be bullied off the internet by an angry mob on social media because of companies and PR.
> because at least we can hold them responsible when they don't deliver it
This is a common but I believe overstated, even naive, ideal. What exactly does "holding them responsible" even truly mean? If a company is greenwashing and they are still emitting carbon, what really is the difference between the company who never claimed to care at all? The carbon is emitted all the same. "Oh, the stock price would fall because investors would lose trust." But greenwashing is a dime a dozen these days and I think the investors/upper class know that greenwashing is just marketing and don’t truly expect/care about the cause.
Regarding this, how does anyone hold Parler accountable for making a platform of "free speech"? Either you sign up or you don’t. If you sign up and complain they aren’t extreme enough, they don’t care or at least they don’t have any material reason to care. If you don’t, where else are you going to go? Twitter? But the whole demographic is people who didn’t like Twitter in the first place and want to be with their kind. So how do you "hold them accountable" without say, legislation, regulation, and government oversight, something today’s "free" speech advocates are opposed to?
"I hate what you say but I will die defending your right to say it". In all places, these people are curating comments and posts to push agenda.
It's incredibly tiresome, not just online but in real life. There is no freedom vs control debate. There's just the people who advocate arresting those who teach their children inconvenient truths vs those who advocate arresting those who use naughty language.
The 2020 election was stolen isn't an inconvenient truth, it's not naughty language, it's a lie that the majority of GOP house candidates are furthering. You're mischaracterization of the debate leads me to believe you made this comment in bad faith.
I was actually talking about CRT and the history of slavery in the United States. That's the inconvenient truth legislatures in some states are attempting to arrest people for teaching. Plenty of people are trying to keep election conspiracy theories off social media but as far as I know nobody is trying to pass a law against spreading them.
You're mischaracterization of the debate leads me to believe you made this comment in bad faith.
And there it is. Advocate for free speech in front of a left-leaning audience and you're a conspiracy-spewing Republican. Advocate for free speech in front of a right-leaning audience and you're a child-grooming communist. Like I said, tiresome.
"The only somewhat free place I've seen is 4Chan but it contains so much toxicity, that's its barely bearable."
Yes, this is what you'll end up getting on so called 'free speech' platforms. Because, unfortunately, these days what people really mean when they say 'free speech' is actually a veil for them to say hateful things about marginalized groups of people.
> Yet again, I like that Musk and Kanye kind of people claim that they want free speech because at least we can hold them responsible when they don't deliver it.
What does "holding them responsible" look like? Making pseudo-anonymous comments on HN calling them out?
Giving them the benefit of the doubt at this point that they are acting in good faith seems hopelessly naïve and exactly the smokescreen they are looking for. They're saying whatever Bullshit(tm) it takes to get through this week with the best possible outcome, and you want to circle back in a couple years? No one will care or remember remember what the initial statement was.
> The only somewhat free place I've seen is 4Chan but it contains so much toxicity, that's its barely bearable.
It's very interesting that you don't see the straight line between "absolute" free speech and toxicity.
Absolute free speech IRL is moderated by physical and emotional stimuli and inhibitions against direct confrontation and bucking social norms. There are also legal repercussions, such as libel or defamation suits, for particularly harmful speech. The anonymity, and lack of accountability or feedback to one's words makes people far less inhibited online.
> The only somewhat free place I've seen is 4Chan but it contains so much toxicity, that's its barely bearable.
You've found the problem. There _are_ "anything legal" online spaces, and they _suck_. There's no way to have 0 moderation and not have the place turn basically into 4Chan.
If people really want to be on totally free speech platforms, they can just go on 4Chan, but what they really want is to force everyone else to engage with the toxic shit they want to say and no one else wants to hear.
why would you go to wikipedia to get a copy of twitter's policies? Anyways based on what you've said so far you haven't actually been paying attention. It's been year's since Dorsey went Rogan's show and took one his trust and safety lawyers with him to do all the legal talk so he could maintain deniability.
Interesting how often "free speech" seems to equate with "free to be offensive jerk". If your best argument is presented in s way that makes it sound like "You're ruining my life! I hate you forever!" then maybe you should go for a timeout and come back when you can discuss things calmly and rationally. I listen to arguments, not tantrums and swearing
> Yet again, I like that Musk and Kanye kind of people claim that they want free speech because at least we can hold them responsible when they don't deliver it.
How do you propose to do that, if you can't hold reddit, twitter et al accountable for the same today?
Free speech is only a concept in a judicial sense. E.g. If you come barging into my house spewing racist shit I may not be able to call the police in you for being a racist, but i'm throwing you off my property
Free speech advocacy was trendy with the left when the right held more institutional power. Now it's embraced (at least as a slogan) by the right. In much the same way I don't trust Apple to give a damn about software freedom, but they backed Webkit and clang for their own self interested reasons. I accept that being "on the side of free expression" means that I will need to shift political allegiances now and then as power consolidation shifts. Along the way the tools for enabling and preserving free speech get better and better though. Long live the anti-establishment wingnut right... until they win, then I'll be hanging with Jimmy Dore.
If you look at it politically, there are people on the right in the US who complain incessantly about cancel culture and how they feel persecuted on Twitter who like to ban books and passed the "don't say gay" legislation in Florida.
CPAC, the conservative PAC, canceled Milo Yiannopoulos when was planning to speak there.
I don't blame them, because Yiannopoulos was always acting in bad faith. If one of his talks hadn't gotten canceled it would have been a personal failure on his part and a clear indication that he didn't go far enough and would have to be even more offensive next time. The point with Yiannopoulos was that he'd get canceled, get attention, find some fool who would pay even more to hear a "controversial" speaker, and repeat the cycle. CPAC wised up to what is going on.
Elon Musk, for instance, claims to be a free speech absolutist. However, in practice, he attempts to suppress speech that is expressed through bots that advertise crypto currency in replies to him.
I’m pretty sure all you need is a free speech platform with a tiktok style algorithm that suppresses the grimiest of toxicity. Such a platform would blow every other one of the park and have a rush of content creators. I believe as those engagement algorithms become more accessible we’ll see a clear winner emerge.
The kind of censorship that occurs on places like Twitter or Facebook is purely an artifact of free market capitalism. The existence of odious people with socially unacceptable opinions decrease the value of the platform. Given those kind of people unfettered access to a private platform when they are not contributing to the growth and vibrancy of the platform is essentially just charity. This is the "marketplace of ideas" functioning exactly as it's supposed to.
How could an average outside observer distinguish between another's mental illness and a guy who's just a real out of the box thinker who might be wrong about many ideas but might also add value to the world by perceiving reality in an atypical way?
A lot of posters are claiming Kanye is mentally ill and unable to manage his own affairs. What is the direct evidence of this? And I don't simply mean "provide examples of opinions he's said that I don't understand or care for".
I think it's pretty dangerous to be labeling people involved in the national dialogue as mentally ill without a diagnosis, or at least some substantial and direct evidence. This label could be weaponized by an authoritarian political movement in a very dangerous way if that's the precedent we're using.
>Kanye is mentally ill and unable to manage his own affairs. What is the direct evidence of this?
One such was, according to him, an occasion when "they handcuffed him, drugged him, put him on the bed".
Now despite this, I also don't agree with just handwaving the discussions then, like, oh he's mad, so everything strange thing he does must be because of that. I think that it's perfectly valid to be mentally ill on one hand, and a huge asshole on the other. A strong motivator for sure, but illness is not a character trait, mental or not.
On a second thought, I'd also like to add that the human psyche is not a solved problem. An average outside observer absolutely can't tell if an out of place thing is because of illness, or something other than that. Even the "standard" way to recognize and classify mental disorders, the DSM-5, changes from one edition to the other.
> One such was, according to him, an occasion when "they handcuffed him, drugged him, put him on the bed".
This doesn't seem like good evidence. It assumes that whenever someone is forcibly restrained and medicated, it was justified. It also assumes that he wasn't exaggerating when he said this. You have also not provided a source of him saying this.
The link is the source, but he used the "you" pronoun and I rephrased it as "him". Sorry for the confusion, I probably need to do better on a public forum like this.
Wikipedia also has a paragraph about it, if you'd like to dig into this topic further.
Also I reject the assumption that I assumed that "whenever someone is forcibly restrained and medicated, it was justified". I haven't said this, and I only reported on his account on the happenings, because OP wanted evidence for mental illness, and I think that him recollecting that occurrence, while admitting that he was diagnosed bipolar, is good enough evidence.
I never want to be engaged in mind-reading, but it seems to me that the people who are shouting about him being mentally ill the loudest are doing so in a way to justify stifling everything he says, as if saying "he's mentally ill" ends any conceivable discussion about any of his ideas.
I think my general question remains. "How could an average outside observer distinguish between another's mental illness and a guy who's just a real out of the box thinker who might be wrong about many ideas but might also add value to the world by perceiving reality in an atypical way?"
In my opinion there's no real discussion to be had on the things he is saying recently, so dismissing them as the rantings of a mentally ill man is the most charitable thing to do. If he's not mentally ill, then he's an extremely ill-informed anti-Semite who either believes outlandish things or pretends to for engagement.
Even if he’s known to be mentally ill, his ideas can still stand. Take Ted Kaczynski for example. His actions were inexcusable but his ideas and writings on technology and its relationship to society have value.
Do you think Kanye's claims that Hollywood Jews have placed child actors in his home to sexualize his children will stand the test of time and be shown to have value?
Whether or not some or all of Kanye's claims are the most ridiculous things, cherry-picking and presenting one piece of bait and trying to associate everything Kanye has ever said with the same brush feels like a hell of a disingenuous way to argue. You can't just dismiss everything somebody said just because they were very wrong other stuff.
PS: I'm not going to say what's true or false about any of Kanye's claims here, but who the hell knows what goes on in the highest levels of Hollywood? This is a circle of people who felt zero shame publicly disparaging critics of Roman Polanski. And apparently the Harvey Weinstein stuff was common knowledge in Hollywood crowds for decades. If you think Kanye has little credibility, well, think about how Hollywood's credibility ought to be perceived.
You can't. More often than not, mental illness goes hand in hand with unorthodox thinking that breaks the mold and causes unexpected progress.
We could even say that mental illness is defined by falling significantly out of alignment with the median mind of society. A mentally healthy person in our modern society might be seen as completely insane and unwell in a hunter gatherer tribe.
But we generally don't get to work out who was just mentally ill with no value and who was a value add until well after their death.
"Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers."
> I think it's pretty dangerous to be labeling people involved in the national dialogue as mentally ill without a diagnosis, or at least some substantial and direct evidence.
I think this is a lot less dangerous than you think. When people throw around terms like "groomer", "nazi", and "abuser" with reckless abandon, labelling someone as "bipolar" hardly compares. Ultimately anyone that agrees with what Kanye is saying will not be swayed by the label, neither will those who disagree with him by the lack thereof.
A lot of the commentary about his mental illness seems to be focused on trying to find an explanation for why his ideas and positions seem to have radically shifted in the last few years. Honestly, it kind of gives him an "out". If he was not afflicted by some kind of mental illness when he called for "Death con 5", his actions are even more morally suspect.
Strictly speaking nothing matters cuz we're all just rando's typing on the internet. But since we were having a discussion I thought I'd chime in with some vaguely relevant points...
Btw I think it would've been quite dangerous indeed to call someone a communist during mccarthy era, and indeed one should've been wary of that back then.
I think the parallel stands. A lot of the egregious political abuse of mental illness in the US dates back to 50-100 years ago[1]. You don't hear about public figures being involuntarily committed over accusations of mental illness in recent years. The worst you get is accusations of senility against some of America's older politicians.
I'm seeing the mental illness label used to defend him more than stigmatize him. The tone is "he's not really responsible for the antisemitism, he just can't help it."
I think we should also realize there's not much difference between mental illness and having incorrect basic beliefs, except treatment options are different.
Can't make private individuals or companies host your speech. Can't make people listen to your speech. There's no protection against civil (ie, non governmental) action against your speech. You want freedom, host it your self and be prepared to accept the consequences and gains.
Go to Speakers Corner and have a go. Put up a website. Buy a TV/Radio station, or Internet provider.
Twitter became de-facto a part of public square. Especially since appointed and elected officials started using for official and non-official communicate. The US court of appeals said it pretty clearly here: https://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/documents/local/4th-circui...
Censoring individual twits is one thing, but banning entire account is a different thing, because now it restricts your ability to interact with elected officials.
Besides, equal time rule demands that TV and radio stations(private and public) give equal time to competing politicians. There are exceptions, but logically it should extend to social media and video hosting sites, because they are today’s version of radio and TV stations.
On top of that, I would argue social media became the only mean of public assembly, which is a protected right, during Covid lockdown. Politicians pay attention to twitter, you can’t assemble by the city hall with banners to express your opinion, because you are to stay home. The next closest thing is to swarm twitter and facebook, given how closely they watch trends there.
As a counterpoint, even in the public square, not all types of speech are allowed. For a frivolous example, many cities have noise ordinances and laws against breaking the public peace. So you get tossed in jail for a night for being a public nuisance.
We treat Twitter and Internet forums less seriously, as if someone can say whatever the fuck they want with no consequences at all. That’s not how it works in the public square, so why should it be that way on Twitter?
> That’s not how it works in the public square, so why should it be that way on Twitter?
No one seriously suggests that all types of speech are allowed. Malevolently shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater is not free speech.
Noise ordinance have fairly limited scope and in virtual scope is actually fairly easy to deal with. I don't care what Kanye West things and I don't subscribe to him. As for disorderly conduct, it is such a wide net of laws, that it can range from misdemeanor like making loud noises to criminalizing homelessness or some other biased laws, I don't think that even make sense to apply this logic to the virtual space.
>Can't make private individuals or companies host your speech.
There is no fundamental reason this is an unchangeable true. A lot of the noise around Section 230 repeal and other laws being passed in places like Texas are designed to alter exactly this norm.
Personally I am not sure if I would change it or not, I am just pointing out that it is far from written in stone...
They can try to disincentivize private censorship, but unlikely to stop it. I believe the primary argument is forcing these companies to publish speech is a violation of their own free speech.
Right now section 230 means you can censor without censoring perfectly and not get sued. Repealing it means Facebook are liable for anything posted there IF the censor at all. So Facebook either gives up all censorship (free speech!), or gives up all user driven content (unlikely).
That's just civil law, the constitutional right to free speech doesn't cover getting sued for it. Even if it does apply to corporations right to censor...
I'm pretty sure repealing section 230 would mean companies would be liable for everything posted on their platforms. I would expect censorship/moderation to reach broadcast TV levels in that case.
> At its core, Section 230(c)(1) provides immunity from liability for providers and users of an "interactive computer service" who publish information provided by third-party users:
>> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
There are 2 sections we care about. The first (203(c)1) defines platforms as not being publishers so they're not liable (civilly) for content. That means they don't HAVE to moderate.
But that leaves a problem. As soon as you start moderating, you become a publisher whether you like it or now.
So there is ALSO 230(c)2
>Section 230(c)(2) further provides "Good Samaritan" protection from civil liability for operators of interactive computer services in the good faith removal or moderation of third-party material they deem "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected."
That lets platforms moderate and censor if they want to AND STILL NOT GET SUED when their moderation is not perfect.
Platforms probably have c1 rights anyway, courts ruled on that before 230 was enacted (section 230 is the remains of a bigger law that was ruled unconstitutional because it didn't respect the free press aspects enough)
So without section 230, platforms have 2 options: no moderation OR moderate but eat a tonne of liability.
Section 230 let's them have the best of both worlds: remove things AND don't be held responsible for things you didn't remove.
I should have been clearer that it was c2 that I was referring to.
If c2 were repealed, most platforms would have to stop all moderation. HN would be gone as we know it.
Messy enough?
In theory we could repeal the whole thing, but that has much the same effect as just repealing c2: companies close their user created content or get sued into oblivion by any lawsuit happy citizen.
You can see how this turns into political talking points and mis understandings very easily about how section 230 is both critical the free speech and against free speech and stops companies and enables them depending on the agenda of the speaker...
Edit: I previously referred to Texas (re: the comment about laws being passed there, which I think refer to those to restrict de-platforming). What I meant with this comment was more like "if a state passes a law like Texas, it might be easier not to do business there than to comply," which obviously wouldn't work if section 230 was defanged or repealed. I don't think that would ever happen, but who knows.
Yea, I edited my comment, I was talking more about those states which make their own laws which would affect a platform. One of the up-comments in this chain referred to that Texas law that I think is supposed to prevent de-platforming. Section 230 would certainly have widespread effects.
I think you're right. Basically no user content platform that isn't (heavily) privately subsidised could survive without sec 230. Facebook would either need to charge hundreds of dollars a month per user or close accounts.
I think one of the things that limits our society is that we need complex laws (sec 230 is very misunderstood, the same is true of financial regulation though) AND laws have to be simple enough that voters cannot be misled over what they do. That's a very tight constraint, sort of like building the Apollo project but only 10 year olds are allowed to work on it...
Or you can do it the old fashion way. When I was in undergrad, anti abortion people showing graphic imagery and religious fanatics would use the fact that the main quad was a public space to stump their opinions. Most people would ignore them, others would stop to argue with them, but the cops never did anything because legally they could not remove them from a public space for speaking.
That happened at my school, too. There was one guy, little bald and always wearing a slightly too big suit, yelling about gays and the immorality of anal sex. Something tells me he fueled more experimentation than if he hadn't been there.
"If that killjoy doesn't like something it must be fun!"
I'm gonna be a contrarian here and say I'm genuinely excited to see what Yeezy does with the platform, assuming its not just a passing interest. For all his antics, his work in music and fashion is legit, and those two are a large reason people are on social media today.
If we required artists be 100% free of mental illness, we would not have Van Gogh, Georgia O'Keeffe, Kusama Yayoi, Michelangelo, Brian Wilson, etc. Let him be him, enjoy what he creates, and take it all with a grain of salt.
Lol who says he's being exploited? The dude has a couple billion, one doesn't get that kind of money by being gullible and easily exploitable. He can handle himself. Do we even know the valuation?
People can be abused and be successful at the same time. Their success doesn't exempt them from being hurt, in fact, it makes them even more of a target, while they are not less vulnerable at all.
Also I haven't implied that he's easily exploitable. The exploiter for example can be a real pro at it.
Man, I hope someone exploits me by buying my documentary for $30 million!
...but seriously folks, this article is uses the word "exploitation" to mean "exposure" of celebrities' personal lives for entertainment/gossip (e.g. Marilyn Monroe, UK royals, etc.) Smart celebs like Kim K and no doubt Kanye cash-in big-time on this exploitation... it's hard to think what Kim K actually does aside from making billions off of her own "exploitation" in some sense.
Re: Parler acquisition, "exploitation" means "fleecing", i.e. selling an asset to him at far greater than the market price b/c he is mentally ill and doesn't know better (akin to elder exploitation.) I haven't seen a valuation, but Parler did a $16M Series B in Sept 2022, so you'd think that the valuation was probably benchmarked off that. Maybe he paid a small premium, but TBH back to my original point if he takes it seriously and grows it, it could be worth 10-100x what he paid.
Funny thing I just learned the same a few days ago, but I think through a click-chain beginning on HN. Been awhile since I was last at Mori Art Museum, they have some good stuff. Many years ago I used to volunteer there giving tours for learning disabled young adults.
Recommend to check out the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), they have some killer exhibits, I've been to nearly every one the last few years.
Nice!! You must have caught the Jean Prouve exhibit on its closing day then. That one was killer, I really enjoyed it with all the actual portable houses setup.
Another highlight in this past year was an exhibit the making of the classic Godzilla movies, they had some of the miniature sets recreated.
> - It's still unclear exactly why both occurred. Supposedly it's antisemitism, but he also just wore a "white lives matter" shirt
Ye saying he's "going to go defcon 3 on the Jews" is absolutely antisemitic and absolutely why he got restricted on Twitter. [0] That's the tweet that was received moderation, and its subject matter is very clear. I don't see how one could be unclear of why that got removed or unclear that's it's antisemitic.
Wearing a shirt doesn't magical erase one's behavior. "White lives matter," "All lives matter", it does not matter; what a shirt says won't make his antisemitic comments not antisemitic. Kinda like staring a sentence "I'm not a racist but..." doesn't make whatever racist comment that follows not racist.
As an aside him wearing the shirt isn't in support of Jews or white lives, it's him being funny/ironic. Read your own source. When you have a "<minority> lives matter" it's about speaking up for an un/under-represented group. White lives matter is a joke, as they are the majority. To paraphrase your source, it's funny because it's a black man stating the obvious.
The whole JP Morgan thing happened before all this, they dumped him back in September. A week or so before even that he was talking about dropping Chase on TV, he was upset at not getting face time with Jamie Dimon, and he'd been mad at them on social media before that.
The recent statements about Jews and the "white lives matter" thing are both after that letter. That it was instead retaliation for "his beliefs" is a convenient inference his camp is happy for people to draw though.
I personally haven't seen an issue with Candace Owens based on what I've seen, do you have examples of a grift or something that can shed some light on this?
> In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial
In my opinion controversy and political incorrectness are Okay. I don't think people should be too concerned about hurting others' feelings when discussing objective phenomena or expressing their own opinion (as long as they acknowledge their subjectivity) . Nevertheless obvious (although not to everyone) absurd, blatant lies and manipulations shouldn't be covered by the free speech umbrella. I wish people could correctly judge what they read themselves, taking what they read and what they feel critically, but many apparently can not.
This would be a good rule, but there's no objective, especially no objective phenomena.
So what remains is that we can strive to be truthful, while trying not to be hurtful. Assertive communication, I-messages (communicating one's own account, instead of putting the other in focus), studying fallacies and trying to avoid them, things like that.
> Nevertheless obvious (although not to everyone) absurd, blatant lies and manipulations shouldn't be covered by the free speech umbrella.
"Capitalism is the problem", "modern employment is wage slavery". These are absurd, blatant lies meant to manipulate. Would you have statements like that removed?
These are opinions. And I lean to agreeing with them (except I don't think anybody knows a good solution to the problem). Blatant lies/absurd are things like all (or almost all) people of specific race are inherently evil or stupid, they control the state for their wicked aims and there is a gene for specific preferences which ought to be eradicated or we are doomed.
I do not assume that people mean "if we only removed capitalism, everything would be fine" when they say "capitalism is the problem." I assume they mean something more like "replacing capitalism with [y] would make things much better than marginal changes to capitalism" where [y] is probably democratic socialism, or that they mean something like "most problems can be traced back to capitalism and to fix these problems we need to fix capitalism" where "fixing capitalism" means enacting whatever policies the speaker happens to advocate for.
Someone saying "it would be better if the US adopted a government closer to the USSR's" is a pretty out there statement and I'm not going to assume that someone means that unless they're pretty clear about it.
There's a conversation of some depth to be had here. I think it might simply devolve into "rhetoric is part of a struggle for power", but I am not ready to be that cynical yet.
"Capitalism is the problem". Let's take this as untrue (ironic laughter from the peanut gallery).
Could "capitalism is the problem" be an opinion coming from one person and a blatant lie coming from another?
Is it fundamentally different from "ethnicity X is the problem"?
That's an interesting point, and it seems correct. You need to consider the context and background to get an idea whether someone doesn't know better or actively tells the truth.
That's often hard for me with a lot of the "out there" medical advice, where it's not immediately obvious to me that they're just scams where the person goes home to laugh at the fools giving them money, but rather themselves believe in whatever theory they're advocating. I don't think it becomes an opinion (it's still a statement claiming to be factual), but it's not a lie, and certainly not blatant, though some of it is absurd (but again not to everyone, obviously).
Is 2x2=7.21 an opinion or a simple absurd? I don't insist the lies I mentioned are as easy to identify. I understand they are easier for some people to believe. But the nature of the difference (as compared to complex, discussable philosophical ideas like "capitalism is a problem") seems to be the same. While abstract philosophical questions of the "life, universe and everything" category can be discussed infinitely and there is no simple right answer, there also are questions to which a simple answer exists, discoverable by any person who would care to exercise some logic (preferably alone, without being afraid to loose an argument).
But how can you seriously compare a statement like 'capitalism is the problem', which is an opinion about how society chooses to organise itself, to bigotry and prejudice against what people were born as, including anti-semitism?
It's self evident that there should be separate standards for that.
It's absurd to call capitalism the problem for e.g. pollution (which is a typical example of 'capitalism is the problem' statements), which every economic system faced (and the communist systems handled much worse than the capitalist), not to mention comparing slavery to 21st century employment in the West. The people uttering those statements know that, they're neither stupid nor children who haven't yet gotten an education, so they're lying, and they're doing so to manipulate.
A similar absurd lie that is intended to manipulate: Russia is being attacked by NATO and only defends itself against the fascists in Ukraine.
> It's self evident that there should be separate standards for that.
Sure, but they shouldn't be based on whether something is true or wrong, absurd or plausible, or said with intent to manipulate or inform.
Better criteria are required, or we'll be back to Twitter's stance of "this instance is against TOS, and that same thing isn't, because we feel like the author didn't mean it the same way", which comes down to "there are no rules other than don't do something/be someone I dislike".
Pollution is an example of an externality which unregulated <anything>ism fails to address, but since capitalism is the dominant economic model and many capitalists advocate for less regulation, it’s not a dramatic leap of logic to say capitalism is the problem.
Again, we've had something very not capitalist to compare it to (which those people tend to love) and boy, was that worse.
But the past tends to be forgotten and on the internet nobody knows that the Soviet Union existed, so why not claim that it didn't. Or that it does, but is being attacked by NATO. Or, my favorite, that Russia doesn't exist, but is just a mirage used by NATO countries to pretend there's an external enemy so their population will follow orders more easily. "It's just an opinion" after all.
This is just a classic straw man, because people don’t typically believe that. Or a red herring, because that’s not really the point.
No one here is suggesting that the Soviet Union has a good track record on pollution. People are suggesting that capitalism doesn’t. “Capitalism is the problem” does not imply that the Soviet Union is the solution.
When people say “capitalism is the problem,” they’re often looking towards an ideal — which sometimes exists and sometimes doesn’t — of a better world. That’s not a bad thing. Practically no one would suggest that an authoritarian flavor of communism (ala USSR) is that ideal.
The US was the only country to decrease emissions over the decades while growing our energy output, all countries in the Paris Climate Accord failed to do so.
We did it because of fracking nat. gas replacing coal due to innovation. Capitalism brings a lot of innovation including advancements in green energy too.
Tesla was able to economically compete and take a huge segment away from the automobile giants through capitalism, forcing them to compete and develop EV cars.
I don't see many socialist countries actually doing much, hell Germany still wanted Russian gas so much someone (wonder who) had to blow up the pipeline!
The statement "capitalism is the problem" can be saying that capitalism is the problem with respect to a more regulated for of capitalism, Nordic socialism, or even a platonic ideal/imaginary version of communism.
Saying that Ukraine is the aggressor in the current war is a much more specific factual claim (that is absolutely a lie).
Being wrong is not lying. To be a lie the person has to know it isn't true. Whether those statements are untrue or not, I think that most people that say those things believe them to be true and so they are not lies.
Hey guys, I have an idea: why don't we try building free-speech protocols rather than free-speech platforms?
Humans are fallible. We like to think we could build something where people can talk freely, but if the ability to censor something we don't like is presented, at some point nearly everybody will take that action because they personally deem it necessary for some greater good.
Ultimately, protocols that cannot be altered or censored (at least without significant and difficult amounts of effort) are what are necessary to obtain true free speech.
There are some groups that are understanding this, and working accordingly. LBRY for example, says exactly this in their "what is LBRY" article:
> Building protocols, not platforms, is the best way to secure a free, open internet.
As long as people use centralized services that are susceptible to fallible human intervention, that fallibility will be acted upon.
Centralization was adequate back when the internet was first brewing. Many people had common interests, people were respectful of others' data often enough that encrypted network protocols weren't deemed necessary. Now, encryption is almost required because so many people have bad intentions. The internet has grown, and so have the amount of conflicting demographics using it.
Just as we had to adopt encryption on a wide scale to keep the internet usable, adopting decentralization at a wide scale will be too. And that includes making it easy enough for normies to access that they think nothing else of it, much like how they don't care what encryption is, as long as there's a lock icon in their search bar.
There's plenty of free-speech protocols, at various levels of the networking stack. TCP/IP. BitTorrent. HTTP. FTP. IRC. As long as you have an Internet connection, you have a voice.
Time has shown again and again that open communication protocols generally lose to walled-gardens. Open protocols stagnate, don't attract capital, and cater to enthusiasts. Most people are perfectly happy with closed platforms and the promise of openness isn't worth even minor inconveniences to them.
There are very few people who just want to speak freely. People choose a platform like twitter because they want to be heard, and they want the opportunity to be heard by people who don't want to listen.
"true free speech" is not something that is free of problems.
Child Porn, Revenge Porn, National Defense secrets leaking, instructions for Chlorine Gas masquerading as instructions for making Play-Doh, libel and slander, weaponized disinformation, doxxing, harassment, threats of violence.
I get there are advantages to avoiding censure, in many extremely important situations.
But don't pretend like it doesn't also hurt people.
I gave a list of examples. Are you legitimately okay with Ye deciding to distribute all of the following examples:
Child Porn, Revenge Porn, National Defense secrets leaking, instructions for Chlorine Gas masquerading as instructions for making Play-Doh, libel and slander, weaponized disinformation, doxxing, harassment, threats of violence.
Protocols to exchange free speech already exist. The hard part is doing something most people consider useful with them without turning yourself into a platform.
I think this makes sense from a business perspective. Social media is actually a surprisingly hard business to make money at - look at Twitter. It's only the superscale businesses that make good money - Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok. And the dynamic is that because these businesses are primarily making money through marketing they need to keep a fairly neutral brand in order to retain an advertiser friendly platform. So what's the alternative? The WashPo business model - find a wealthy benefactor who believes in the mission to fund it.
It doesn't necessarily have to be super expensive to run what is essentially a forum, especially if it's not going to hit massive scale. The only problem is that I don't think owning these platforms will give the kind of cultural relevance that these wealthy far-right types are chasing. So at some point they're going to lose interest and then you're back to the business model problem.
I think the problem is that twitter is attractive _because_ of who is on it. Journalists, liberals. The goal isn't really to permit free speech, it's to make certain ideas and values more palatable in our society. There's no point of buying a big platform if you can't attract/retain the people you're trying to influence.
makes sense to own the means of communication, to shape the narrative.
Ye on Parler will present a pretty clear challenge to US norms of freedom of speech - he is a vocal anti-semite (whilst at the same time claiming to be Jewish)and I doubt very much that ownership of any platform will moderate his views.
> According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), "Some, but not all [Black Hebrew Israelites], are outspoken anti-Semites and racists." As of December 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center "lists 144 Black Hebrew Israelite organizations as black separatist hate groups because of their antisemitic and anti-white beliefs". Tom Metzger, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, once remarked to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "They're the black counterparts of us."
A man associated with the BHI killed 3 people at a Kosher supermarket in New Jersey in December of 2019[1]. That said, they aren't doing this in any organized fashion.
These guys are prevalent in nyc. You can always spot a group of these zealots in hot spots like times sq preying on unknowing passersby baiting them into conversation and bullying them
But at the same time it's like the right-wing(nuts)-news in that not one is profitable and they always need outside money support.
Its one of the ways we are able to identify dirty money in politics as when they do that its easy to track it as opposed to a cash infusion from the platform owner.
I know many won't like this, but I think he meant Defcon 3, which I'm still not sure what it implies. I highly doubt he meant to issue death threats the way that people are perceiving this.
Not to excuse his actions. I'd rather like to know wtf he's talking about and why.he would say something like this.
Given that Parler is primarily associated with alt-right users, this purchase is quite amusing. Yet it underlines how the right to speak freely is under threat online and I am not sure if Billionaires further centralizing access is the right way forward.
Is it too surprising if I tell you that Candace Owen's husband is the CEO of Parler? Yes, the same Candace Owens that has been advising Kanye West and appeared with him in the matching White Lives Matter t-shirt...
Honestly, this whole Kanye thing has made me sad. (pardon my language for a minute) It's a world of shit taking advantage of someone who plainly needs mental health support and assistance.
It makes sense that the "more free" platforms tend to attract people from the right because highly moderated platforms tend to censor right wing discussion more than left wing discussion. More extreme people are kicked off each platform successively until they end up places like 4chan. The opposite would be true if the mainstream advocated right wing politics, forcing left wing people onto the fringes. Similar to what happened pre-internet with the 60s counterculture, left wing ideas were found in the underground, whilst mainstream media pushed right wing ideas.
I've seen people on both the "left" and "right" claim that Twitter more heavily moderates "their side." Is there any way to know if either "side" is correct?
I doubt Twitter classifies moderated content into political buckets as this would create massive liability, but has any neutral third party studied what kind of content is removed and classified it into "left" vs "right"?
I'd like to see the system that could accurately perform such classification at scale, if such a thing is even possible, since no one seems to know exactly what "left" and "right" mean.
For example, "liberal" and "left" are often conflated even though hardcore leftists tend to have a healthy disdain for liberals (in the modern, colloquial sense).
I think mainstream now pushes both, which, a bit, depends on what you'd call "mainstream". If "mainstream" is "media watched by millions that thematizes the public discourse", then Fox News and Netflix are both mainstream, and their range of ideas being pushed span wide. I don't see that the mainstream prefers either side, on a worldwide stage.
"More extreme people are kicked off each platform successively until they end up places like 4chan."
I think extreme expressions are moderated chiefly because it turns a place toxic, and because the owner wouldn't like to be legally liable for things like hate speech or doxxing.
I know my left wing friends would claim the media still is right wing and truly left wing ideas are disallowed. It may be that the left wing was censored and vilified for so long that it ceased existing in the US.
I mean they were literally persecuted by the United States itself, which the right has never been. McArthyism, blacklisting, banning, COINTELPRO and the most enormous propaganda campaigns in history since WWII. The US went to war with leftists and eradicated them, which is why European (and generally global) politics looks so different as many of those places didn't have such direct oppression.
Yes, the news recently that the FBI monitored Aretha Franklin?!?
The same powerful people that targeted socialists or civil rights leaders also influenced or even owned the media. It’s almost like the internet, at least early on, kind of broke that grip, and the rise of hard right media funded by billionaires with social media promotion weapons/bots/coordination is a response to that.
You named the only two relatively free, large, unmoderated public forums with transparent-able feeds. Well Reddit’s feed is transparent: Lower bound of Wilson score. On Twitter, I only filter for latest, but you cannot do that on Facebook.
Feeds suck, sure, but there's really no censorship for anything about communism etc short of calling for violence against wealthy people.
Facebook is less "free" in that regard since they won't allow "all men are trash", which Twitter would only go after if you qualify it with a race that is considered 'protected', and Reddit would probably ignore completely (but "local" mods might not, which makes Reddit take a special role there).
> As used in this subchapter, the phrase "unlawful employment practice" shall not be deemed to include any action or measure taken by an employer, labor organization, joint labor management committee, or employment agency with respect to an individual who is a member of the Communist Party of the United States or of any other organization required to register as a Communist-action or Communist-front organization by final order of the Subversive Activities Control Board pursuant to the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 [50 U.S.C. 781 et seq.].
To be fair, when that was written being a member of the CPUSA meant there was a very good chance that someone was working with the KGB. There was a long history of people with college ties to communist groups going to work in sensitive industries and passing secrets to the KGB.
For the record I think it was wrong then, but there are literal KGB records of people in the working for them, and some were caught and arrested at the time. Again I think the law was wrong, but the concern was real. As for "Russia Gate", I remain in unconvinced.
[*edit] if you’re downvoting, kindly share your disagreement, I’d be interested to hear what you have to say.
I mean Russia Gate in the conspiratorial Trump as Russian agent sense, which seems unsupported by evidence.
But yes it seems clear that he was Russia’s preferred candidate, though it’s unclear to me whether that made any measurable or meaningful difference. Failing to campaign in the upper Midwest or rust belt as a democrat seemed like an avoidable self-own.
The hacked and leaked DNC and Podesta emails and corresponding fever dreams of cheese pizza meaning child porn and all the other nonsense definitely affected some people. The DNC emails and conspiracies pushed on the left made a lot of Bernie voters sit out. It all adds up. Our national security infrastructure should actively combat that kind of foreign interference.
It’s not random chance to be hacked then have your emails woven into malicious conspiracies. It’s a crime.
The DNC favored the Democrat over the independent. That’s to be expected. The voters picked Hillary. The conspiracy that it was stolen from Bernie was pushed by Russia. It’s literally public record in the Mueller report. I don’t recall if Russia started it but that’s irrelevant. A large organized foreign propaganda machine can seize on something like that and push it far. Russian agents still run many Bernie Reddit and Facebook groups. Just follow r/ActiveMeasures.
Increasing Hillary’s dislike and distrust was very clearly a goal of foreign operatives. It worked.
You cannot point to any one thing and know for sure it was the difference maker. Trump barely won. Any one of 6 things that served to suppress the vote may have made the difference.
Not downvoting, in fact I agree with you. The speed at which these old claims were trotted out against Trump and any Republican right of Lindsay Graham has me thinking about their veracity in a new light.
The news media maybe. But watching tv, surfing the web, etc the majority generally sides with the liberal status quo of our times. It's rare to see genuine positive religious sentiment in media compared to real life, and it's very obvious to me
But isn’t that an indication that truly free peoples are less religious as opposed to a conspiracy? My whole life there have been religious cable news shows. If they were extremely popular, they’d air on prime time or their content would be shared more on social media. It’s not being blocked.
I'm an Indian muslim, and I know many asian and middle eastern muslims. I also know a smattering of Sikhs, Hindus, jews, etc. I can't say that the religious attitudes of any of these groups seemed to be represented on tv. No one is saying it's a conspiracy. But it's not a conspiracy either that when you start interacting with many minority groups you notice in general they are fairly religious. And it's their experience that get's ignored in the American national 'christian right vs secular left' rivalry.
believing that what you see on TV reflects reality 1:1 is exactly why it's so dangerous—it's a wholly artificial, professionally-curated window into reality, nothing more, nothing less. I'm a bit shocked to see people still buying into the idea that it's an accurate reflection of reality, as you are, still, in the current year.
what makes you think that the content that appears on television is any sort of democratic free marketplace of ideas? why would that be the case, given its obviously corporate structure? like sure, you have "FOX News" presenting one Approved Viewpoint, and everyone else representing The Other Approved Viewpoint... but where are all the Unapproved Viewpoints on television? obviously, they're not there, for wholly obvious reasons.
Discussing, or claiming that it was definitely a lab leak? Because the former should be fine, and encouraged, the latter, until it's proved either way, is disinformation.
Is it though? A lot of this free speech stuff usually boils down to "I wanted to say the n word on facebook". I'm not aware of any conservatives being arrested by the US government because they advocated for free market capitalism.
I mean you can say “men are trash”, “white people are trash” and so on, but at the same time you are not allowed to say anything against jewish people or other people? Isn’t it kinda hypocritical? Maybe we should not allow toxic behavior at all and have a civil discourse about someone is feeling towards some group of people to allow him to change his mind? Personal attacks and hatred will not do any good this will only prove to that person that he is right.
On one hand, there should ideally be no discrimination. So, hate speech directed even at white males should be disallowed.
On the other hand, society resolved through politics (such as Affirmative Action) that the compound interest and lasting synergistic effects of historical discrimination should be compensated for somewhat. The only way to do that is through more discrimination (i.e. relatively penalizing the least historically discriminated-against people).
I suspect this selective enforcement of the rules is one kind of such relative penalization.
What I don't understand is why do private companies take it upon themselves to do this. Is it genuine stakeholder concern (in conflict with profits)? ESG criteria giving them access to cheaper funding or tax breaks? Plain marketing? Virtue signalling?
>The only way to do that is through more discrimination (i.e. relatively penalizing the least historically discriminated-against people).
Which is done by creating opportunities for historically discriminated groups, not blindly handicapping white people for being white. I'm not white, but it's really worrying to me that that's allowed. Today it's them, tomorrow it's me, then it's you.
Usually there is no deeper reason than the fact that those private companies are staffed at the administrative and policy level by college-educated yuppies living in San Francisco and New York City, and that demographic has become increasingly ideological in the last few years and bought into the idea that progressive toxicity is either a socially good form of tough love/bullying/peer pressure or at least that restricting it disproportionately damages vulnerable groups, etc while what is labeled regressive toxicity is assumed to be heinous, destroying society, and deserving of quick permanent bans.
Companies are not perfectly rational calculators that always know best how to make money. They are made up of people, and people are flawed. People can be deluded into thinking that their bias toward pet issues is profit-neutral or even profit-positive. It happens in the non-politicized corporate sphere all the time - boondoggles is the term.
People are lazy they think that some sort of compensation will resolve all their issues but it’s not.
Everyone knows that these companies control people because they are constantly engaged on their platforms they can push anything they want. Companies will support any dominating regime for their own good it doesn’t matter if it’s democrats or republicans, fascists or communists, etc.
> I mean you can say “men are trash”, “white people are trash”
Are you sure? It's been a few years since I purged all social media from my life, but three years ago, it was going around and seemingly well-documented with screenshots that saying "men are trash" would get your post auto-deleted and your account sanctioned on Facebook.
This seems like another of those things where extremists on all sides believe they're being uniquely persecuted and some other side of the spectrum is given free reign, when more likely than not most mainstream platforms are pretty centrist.
I believe that's because Facebook gave itself some actual rules and then enforced them, regardless of who said it and who was the subject of the post, they treated all groups the same. Twitter or Reddit do not.
no, when you are banned, you pretty much cant get your account back. When it is locked, there are steps you can undertake to get access restored (like deleting the offending content).
Moderation[0] is not censorship. It just means having a productive conversation and debate without name-calling, slurs, and other malfeasance. "Trash" is not a harmful word, but inciting violence against an ethnic group definitely is harmful. There's also historical baggage attached to ethnic groups such as the Jews who were persecuted in an actual war and genocide. "Men" is too generic.
There's a really concerning trend on HN and elsewhere I'm seeing. Everyone now seems to think free speech is too dangerous to try and promote anymore. It's been a shift over a couple years.
I'm not supporting Ye or any of his bullshit, but some of the comments on here are really chillingly authoritarian.
Parler isn't going to be able to maintain "free speech" even if they or Kanye want it to, which I seriously doubt anyway. They don't "have it now" and they won't have it tomorrow either. Still, it's strange how HN flips so violently against free speech when the content is obviously offensive and low quality.
People need to be better stewards of their own beliefs, not simply shielded from malicious, dim or unsavory ones out there in public.
As an aside, I can't believe celebrities have the sway they do. Today's breed talks like such imbeciles; I have no idea how they keep people's interest.
The idea that it's important to have a mainstream and consequence-free venue for all forms of speech may be your belief but it is not mine.
My belief is that public forums with reach into the tens or hundreds of millions are fertile ground for nationalist and genocidal movements, and they will be used for that purpose if it is not actively prevented.
Moderation of wide-reach public forums with the goal of preventing movements causing mass death and misery is perfectly consistent with my own beliefs about the value, conditions, and limits of free speech. You might believe differently, even oppose these beliefs, but the idea that the only correct stance is yours and all moral, rational people will converge on it is ridiculous.
> My belief is that public forums with reach into the tens or hundreds of millions are fertile ground for nationalist and genocidal movements, and they will be used for that purpose if it is not actively prevented.
Yes, we must crush all opposition so your side can have absolute power!!!
Let them speak?
Not one chance, where shall you draw the line? Where only your side wishes to draw the line, of course. Perhaps, the only choice then is to crush the other side, for if you don't they will use the forum for "nationalist and genocidal movements". So you see, they must be eliminated in their entirety. Wiped from the existence of all forums, wiped from participation in establishing truths. Or maybe, since they always seem to find support, always seem to find people willing to fight for the rights they represent, always seem to come back when you try to silence and silence and silence every mouth that exists, instead of repeatedly ineffectively trying to suffocate a voice that wishes to speak, maybe what you need to do is to eliminate them all, all of them from existence. This is the only way you will ever prevent genocide.
> the idea that the only correct stance is yours and all moral, rational people will converge on it is ridiculous.
I never said that. Conversations exist to be had, good ideas should be promoted and bad ideas disproven and cast aside. Ideas should be considered and judged on their merits, even ones I don't agree with. There's certainly no requirement for any individual to engage.
Despite calling me out, there's irony inherent here in that you believe your stance is the only one that deserves to even be considered. Censoring those that do not believe as you do is the definition of believing you have the "only correct stance".
People do and should have the option to curtail speech in their spaces as they see fit. I choose to converse on platforms that limit my and other's speech minimally. That's not an endorsement of "nationalist or genocidal movements".
> Moderation of wide-reach public forums with the goal of preventing movements causing mass death and misery...
Claimed goals are always rosy until they aren't. Individuals habituated to not having to determine truth for themselves are ultimately doing themselves a disservice. That said, if people prefer platforms that censor certain content, then those platforms will thrive; that's fine and they have. I don't think though that information freedom is on most people's radars when they choose a social media platform. A lot of this legislation that requires mandated strict moderation will only work to entrench big players that can pay to do so.
I'm not a racist genocidal nationalist and I don't follow nor broadcast their content. I still don't want their existence in the public sphere to limit my expression. They're not that important and we shouldn't make them out to be.
> I still don't want their existence in the public sphere to limit my expression. They're not that important and we shouldn't make them out to be.
See this is the key thing and a conflict I pretty much expect and accept. I think they are important, on the metric of their body count over the last century. I'm willing to accept some limitations to public speech, both mine and yours, to reduce their power and risk in the future.
You don't accept that tradeoff, which I find a consistent and reasonable position that I also oppose. But your first comment did imply that it was the only valid position for reasonable people to have ("better stewards of their beliefs"). You may not have intended that meaning but it's the one I read.
> The idea that it's important to have a mainstream and consequence-free venue for all forms of speech may be your belief but it is not mine.
Well, imagine that you got kicked off the internet for saying what you just said? You’re only allowed to express your disagreement because of free speech principles
I have frankly radical political beliefs and am outspoken about them: getting banned and censored is not a hypothetical situation for me but an experience I have actually had many times.
Nevertheless I remain committed to preventing the growth of nationalist, racist, and genocidal movements, and I've come to believe that this requires moderation of large-scale public internet forums.
There is no fair, reasonable, effective content-neutral strategy here. All moderation is ideological, including the choice not to moderate at all. And every choice within that constraint will have consequences. We are better off looking at the consequences we want to prevent and working backwards, than we are starting from a specific ideology and moderating the way it demands.
"No moderation at all" isn't a virtuous abstinence from making this choice or being responsible for the outcomes, it is just one option among many, and one I find to have unacceptable consequences.
> You’re only allowed to express your disagreement because of free speech principles
Sort of true, but it doesn't make sense not to re-evaluate how we apply those principles when we encounter dramatic changes in communication patterns. You can believe in freedom of speech as an end in itself, or you can believe in freedom of speech as better than the alternative. If you think of it as better than the alternative, then you should be consistently measuring to ensure that is still true.
> There's a really concerning trend on HN and elsewhere I'm seeing. Everyone now seems to think free speech is too dangerous to try and promote anymore.
What are you thoughts on free speech regarding misinformation or election denial?
When so many republican candidates reject the result of 2020, what's the right answer? Allow them to continue to divide the country up until half of the populace no longer trusts the democracy and starts another civil war?
I think mandated information disclosure is extremely important in a capitalist system. How can we make good decisions if we don't have good information? We need to ask more questions, trust, but verify. We do pass laws that require those that sell products and services to disclose X, Y and Z for their products in a standardized and uniform manner. Likewise, we should be skeptical and critical about what others are telling us.
Information that's not tied to such a simple tit for tat relationship gets in the weeds though. How do you define "misinformation" as it pertains to your mother on someone's feed? You can claim and sue for damages and if a judge and jury find your case, then that's what it is, but mandating strict systematic moderation of all internet users on social media is not the same as mandating information disclosure for the Kellogs or IKEAs of the world. We've decided that Horseradish dyed green can be sold as Wasabi on the ingredients list. This is officially supported misinformation right?
In this instance, election denial is almost complete idiocy, yes, but barring "election denial" wholesale is a terrible thing to do. Your questions are quite leading too. We need more discussion around these topics, not less. I've talked election deniers off their stupid cliffs before. When SCOTUS shot down the Bush v. Gore recount decades ago, Americans had reason to be upset and talk about it. Would it have been more unifying if everyone had just bowed their heads, quickly and quietly, accepting the results without fuss, sure...
Censorship is a great tool for quelling public dissent. It's a shortcut around reason though and we've built up these tribal walls that preclude solving problems together. If quieting dissenters is the thing you want to maximize, you'll do great with it. We're not the only ones chomping at the bit to censor those that disagree with us, but I guess be careful what you wish for.
I just feel like there’s no other choice. I check out Fox News, Infowars, and other conservative news every once in a while.
It’s incredible what they report. Everything is charged against democrats, and everything is a conspiracy. Of course, left leaning news sites demonize republicans in the same way, but it tends to be less extreme.
I think that in general censorship is wrong, but I just see so few options. I think the state of the US is more worrying than issues like climate change. Hopefully someone can fix it without war.
> Of course, left leaning news sites demonize republicans in the same way, but it tends to be less extreme.
That's from your perceived bias. All MSM is biased and plays these tricks, you cross verify reporting from both extremes, check first hand sources and think for yourself!
You fight misinformation with more information. That's it.
Censorship leads to truth counsels, which leads to corruption.
We already had an example where valid topics were banned even though they were true (laptop story)
You're being a useful idiot if you advocate to take inalienable rights away from your brethren.
People (including yourself, even if you don't realize it) argue for limits on speech in order to protect freedom and liberty. That's not an essentially authoritarian position. It's consistent with liberalism. For example, you probably support making incitement to violence illegal. That is an "authoritarian" position that you agree with. You are using the government to force someone to stop saying something that they wish to say. And yet you support it. Because you implicitly realize that there's no pure world where speech can't infringe on other's freedoms. In the real world you have tension between the rights and freedoms of two people. There's no substitute to fairly arbitrary line drawing that balances this tension. People simply disagree on where the line should be drawn in order to maximize overall freedom.
> Parler isn't going to be able to maintain "free speech" even if they or Kanye want it to
Correct, because they allow EU users to sign up and therefore has to comply with various European countries content laws (including GDPR). Depending on their size and amount of users they could also be forced to store data on EU servers. They would have to remove material illegal in some countries if they have users from said country, i.e German users on Parler posting Nazi material are committing a crime, Parler needs to be able to remove it in time, or face consequences.
Same goes for HN. Sure many small services that let EU citizens sign up on them fly under the radar, but won't for long when more and more people complain to the authorities.
Look at Truth Social, it's not available in the EU because they would face fines if it was and they know it.
In the end it's pretty simple. Do you allow EU users on your platform? Then you need content moderation.
I am with you and this shift is totally alarming. I've seen the pendulum swing slowly, the frog boiling slowly. Now, top comments are about curbing speech which is just insane even in the worst possible interpretation of social media effects.
This is not an HN phenomenon. NYT/WaPo and the left machine is operating on anti-free speech mode right now in combination with Big Corporate + ESG. (See Cloudflare and Kiwifarms issue recently).
> There's a really concerning trend on HN and elsewhere I'm seeing. Everyone now seems to think free speech is too dangerous to try and promote anymore. It's been a shift over a couple years.
this is the result of years of propaganda enacted on an unsuspecting, smartphone-using populace. before the smartphone, the venn diagram of "advocate of free speech" and "Internet user" was a circle—look how far we've fallen since then.
No, it's because the world has drastically changed and people have updated their views given the advent of significant new information. Namely, the invention of social media was the paradigm shifting catalyst.
You people are saying how that is crazy or Kanye has gone crazy, having a breakdown etc, but there is a method to the madness: He ran for president in 2020. He has been posturing himself as a conservative since a while. This move fits into that pattern and signals that he is going to go into GOP politics.
But you missed my point--by galvanizing the conservative base that is racist, homophobic, sexist, and anti-semetic, it leaves the rest of conservative party with an impossible choice--support a democratic candidate, or vote party line.
How do you expect to have a discussion with a Republican if you hold them with such contempt? You realize that they represent roughly half of the country right?
I didn’t really care about your point about Kanye, I can more about people sowing division.
Why do people always resort to argumentum ad populum when it comes to defending the insanity that the modern Republican party has come to represent. They can't be wrong or immoral, there's millions of them!
> defending the insanity that the modern Republican party
I am not defending radicals. I never said they weren't wrong. My point is that you can't tell half of the country to just screw off. And, not all conservatives hold radical positions. I know many that vote conservative mainly because of the issue of abortion.
> How do you expect to have a discussion with a Republican if you hold them with such contempt? You realize that they represent roughly half of the country right?
I'm all for having discussions across the aisle--so to speak. But not with racists, homophobes, anti-Semites, misogynists, etc.
You want to talk to me about abortion being a crime, I'll be respectful, and I'll even share my own personal story related to abortion.
Want to talk to me about border security, and better immigration policy, I'm with you as well.
Want to talk to me about criminal justice, sure, I'm down.
Government spending--yep, cool too.
But those centrist conservative beliefs no longer represent the mainstream viewpoints of the Republican party anymore.
And personally, I do not have issues with republicans--but I do think the ones who believe Biden stole the election are idiots.
I think I agree with you. The republican party has started holding some pretty strange beliefs.
It seems that everyone defaults to hating republicans (or democrats) with no rooms for understanding. Taking this stance is only going to make reconciliation harder, or worse, impossible.
Unless we can have actual discussions with republicans, we're not going to have a democracy for much longer. As it is many republicans think our democracy is gone, and hating on them isn't going to help that.
> I do think the ones who believe Biden stole the election are idiots.
This is something I have a lot of trouble with. I don't think that it was stolen, but how can you or anyone really be sure? I imagine it's much easier for a republican to believe when all conservative news sources make it sound like their very way of life is threatened 24/7.
Many Christians (which tend to be republican) truly believe that the US is actively persecuting them and that Democrats want to make some godless state.
That was my thought as well. He is saying outlandish things to poise himself to run for president in 2024. His relationship to Candace Owens is what tipped off his plan to me.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns. Someone can be brilliant for a long time and still get played in the end. Just take a look at what happened to Tony Hsieh after he got hooked on drugs: https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2021/01/26/cause-o...
> But instead, the community turned into a hedonistic enclave, where people on Hsieh’s payroll indulged his every whim — such as conducting a research report on the laughing gas nitrous oxide, which he was consuming daily, to figuring out a way to stop time—and were less willing to curb his increasingly concerning behavior and excessive drug use, Forbes previously reported. During this time, Hsieh resisted attempts by family members and close friends to check him into rehab, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. By the end of July, Hsieh was estranged from his parents and several of his close friends.
A store can decide what products to put on it shelf. If your product is unpalatable sell it somewhere else or make it palatable, which they (smartly) did.
After they leaked drivers licenses and other personal documents uploaded by their userbase for verification, I'd be astounded that anyone is still willing to use that platform.
IIRC Trump wouldn't join Parler unless it agreed (among other things) to censor his critics. This seems to be a pattern with Trump: he demands that people be more loyal to him personally than to any abstract principle (including free speech absolutism).
"Great Minds Discuss Ideas. Average Minds Discuss Events. Small Minds Discuss People."
I feel there's already disproportionate discussion here about a person and their cult of personality here. This doesn't feel quite in the spirit of HN. Even during the Elon Musk Twitter debacles there was still separate threads about the business dynamics and whether he is playing some kind of 4D chess. The attempts to quickly discredits Ye West's other accomplishment feels borderline like anti-blackness, except with the passive aggressive pretense of being concerned about his mental well-being. For example, Kanye West was part of the Fendi intern cohort which, as a former fashion design student myself, I find to be far more exclusive and prestigious than a Google internship (which I was offered). He's not just a musician but he's behind the scenes for making other established artists including Jay-Z and Beyonce, also billionaires. Even the title of the article being "Kanye West is buying Parler" feels disrespect when he said he goes by Ye, now. This is inconsistent with tech's community plight of respecting self-identification.
This is a community to talk about entrepreneurship, so let's talk about that. How are people jumping to the conclusion that he is being "scammed" without even knowing the terms of the deal? On that note, how much do you think this acquisition will go for? I noticed Parler has 3.3K ratings average 3 stars on the IOs App Store and Truth Social has 121k, averaging 4.5 stars. I will go out on a limb and question whether the 4D chess with Twitter and Parler will somehow involve Truth Social / DWAC.
> This is a community to talk about entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is something you do for a living. A mean to get satisfaction and something you do to feel good.
You can have the best numbers but still be despised by the business community because of the way you act, and similarly nobody in the business community would trade places with you despite your amazing numbers because the way you act denotes mental illness. Money is worth nothing if you have mental illness.
Kanye has burnt a lot of bridges, but he still enjoys a healthy portion of popularity. A very different form of popularity to that of both Trump and Musk too.
Musk and Trump's audiences, I'll admit to guessing about this, are passionate for sure, but:
- In Trump's case, tech literacy is low, the average age is relatively high, and disposable time they have, is probably low
- Musk's audience is undoubtedly tech literate, but I would guess that the age demographic is similar to Trump's, and would further guess their disposable time is similar, if not lower (we nerds barely have time for HN!)
Kanye's audience though... They're young, and they already live online. I can't imagine it overtaking Twitter at any point in the future, but I can definitely imagine the venture gaining more traction than Trump's attempt. And that will encourage other similarly minded business people to support his venture.
The antidote for all who gain information via the Internet is to develop their common sense and critical thinking skills. We must know what to question and then, how to pull answers to form our judgements and our resulting actions. These skills need to be core to all education curriculum.
This is most critical for judgements that lead to consequential decisions and actions. Whether you love someone or hate them, those feelings lead to bad outcomes if not based on correct information and reasoning.
They have become the avocado toast of tech news sites. I remember when they first got started as This Is My Next, when they had Joanna Stern, Joshua Topolsky and Paul Miller, the good ole days...
He has obviously gone off the rails and needs help (I don't think he was like this many years ago). I'm disappointed that people view his antics as entertainment. He is serious, and quite obviously has a progressing problem. My original question, which has already been down-voted, was sincere.
Par for the course in America, he will probably end up jailed due to his mental health issues.
is anyone else completely uncomfortable with how completely comfortable everyone is with people playing armchair psychiatrist for people they've never even personally met these days
Yes. “Everyone I disagree with is crazy” is a real thing and disgusting. Reading a psychology book and a couple pop news articles doesn’t make these people psychiatrists or psychologists.
People with mental illnesses are legally entitled to the same rights as people that have not been diagnosed with a mental illness, unless their rights (such as to purchase assets with their own money) have been specifically taken away from them following due process.
Criticizing an ethnic group / culture is racist. If you're racist against Jews, that's called anti-Semitism. It's a reliable indicator that someone is a nutcase, either far-right or far-left.
It's even worse than many other forms of bigotry because Jews have been targeted for genocide repeatedly over the centuries, most recently one human lifetime ago, and in an advanced Western nation.
Absolute free speech platforms don't work for the majority of people because they have no way of constraining participants to the Overton Window.
It may be hard to understand for some, but there are topics that make people highly uncomfortable. These people prefer an environment that 'protects' them from fringe ideas.
The issue is, the 'Overton Enforcement' doesn't work when a large minority (say, 30% of users) has ideas considered highly controversial to the majority of users. Most people actually do want to live in a bubble most of the time so being exposed to these opinions undermines their sanity.
A 100% free speech platform could work fairly well though if it was sophisticated enough to understand what a user does and doesn't want to see and then only occasionally expose them to controversial content. Kind of like TikTok's 'for you' page but with less censorship. Or, perhaps, let users control their exposure directly. Twitter doesn't have the technical capability to pull this off though so they are stuck with occasionally infuriating large minorities of users.
It seems that the main problem is trying to force everyone into the same enironment and searching for a one-size-fits-all solution, leading to censorship of almost any topic for which there is a vocal enough group that wants it censored.
A simple solution would be federation - let people build and choose their own bubbles instead of forcing everyone into a one giant bubble. That's how it works in real-life.
