It's not irony. The ability to say something doesn't imply anyone is obligated to either listen or agree.
Downvotes imply a desire to quiet a signal (or at least, a belief the signal is uninteresting and should show up below other signals) and the site is designed to enhance interesting signals and suppress uninteresting ones.
Everything here is doing exactly what it says on the tin. The weird notion is that one should be able to just walk into a space like this, say whatever, and get it treated with the same reverence as any other statement.
There are other places on the internet that act like that, and they are not this place.
The parent comment implied that a particular political faction engages in silencing and perhaps its extremer form: cancellations. The reaction to the statement is to soft-silence that remark.
This means it hit a nerve, presumably for the exact demographic mentioned, whom then proceeded with (mild) censorship. That's perfect irony.
Just like it's irony when Singapore authorities banned any newspapers stating that the authorities are authoritarian. That's irony by its very definition.
I'm just saying it's irony. I don't care if one agrees with the statement or not, or what is allowed/popular to say on HN. I'm well aware this is a California forum. I now expect downvotes to confirm that it is.
> If you haven't noticed the chorus of coastal media types asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum, then you are truly oblivious.
This doesn’t seem like a low-signal comment: it’s factually true and relevant to the context.
Rather, people are falsely marking it as low signal because they don’t like it and want to manipulate the discussion by hiding things they don’t like.
Which is classic censorship — and I think highlights a deeply anti-intellectual trend in this community.
People sometimes down-signal a comment because it's not the type of comment they want to see on HN for reasons other than factual content.
Prognosticating the zeitgeist is a fraught enterprise, but in this case, I'd guess tone twanged a lot of nerves. The first two sentences of comment guidance [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html] are "Be kind. Don't be snarky." There's a vast Internet that lacks a rule like that and HN tries to do something other than be that.
I think whether "be kind" is at odds with, or a criteria of, an intellectual discourse is left as an exercise for (possibly literally, in this case) the reader.
One could imagine a smart person can figure out how to phrase a thought in a way palatable to an audience, or at least respectful of the notion that different individuals have different life experience.
If failure to do so gets one's comment "censored" out of an intellectual discourse, perhaps that is a feature not a bug.
When I was younger, I used to believe "The pursuit of truth is so important that even truth coarsely spoken should not be quieted." As I've gotten older, I've come to observe that more often than not, people conflate coarse speaking with truth when the two are more likely to be divorced from each other than walking hand-in-hand. And the ability to smooth a harsh truth is a virtue... If for no other reason than most people read for entertainment, not truth-seeking, so the important facts are likelier to land in their minds and germinate if they aren't coated in a protein shell of personal attack language.
But again, prognosticating downvotes is a fraught enterprise (and also recommended against by the guidelines, so I shall say no more on the topic).
I understand that the reason people use the veneer of propriety to justify censorship is so they can do as you’ve done here: give a long self-righteous screed about how they’re upholding the good of the community when engaging in anti-intellectual censorship.
> One could imagine a smart person can figure out how to phrase a thought in a way palatable to an audience, or at least respectful of the notion that different individuals have different life experience
This is just an imagining — people say this when they’re upset that facts challenge dearly held delusions, eg the media is unbiased and informs you about the world, and then engage in ex post facto attacks on the form of your message to silence you and remove that cognitive annoyance. The anger is not at the phrasing, but in having their world view challenged at all.
I think you brought up that imagining because you need to reassure yourself that you’re calmly rational as a reader — and not lashing out with censorship due to emotions. That you’re not actually anti-intellectual, you just happen to be copying their mannerism — for good!
We’ve heard these arguments for millennia: can you name a historic (prior to 1900) example where those censoring in the name of decorum led to positive outcomes?
Large US news companies have their staff largely in areas like California, New York, etc. because US media conglomerates are concentrated in those areas.
Eg, WarnerMedia who is the parent company of CNN — a news agency that’s undergone substantial cuts under a new CEO due to its bias.
My experience of WarnerMedia is that they have politics among their staff reflective of the cities they’re in, but which may not reflect the overall demographics of the US. Eg, their Seattle office had politics at place in Seattle — but those are far left of most US politics. That bias impacts the choices made about content.
This matches other peoples experience and apparent business decisions — eg, the other poster referring to this same bias and CNN experiencing a sharp drop in ratings followed by corporate restructuring under a new CEO.
expand on how this in any way shows that a "...chorus of coastal media types..." (again, still waiting for a definition of this) are somehow factually "...asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum"
Sorry — I didn’t realize you were being disingenuous.
I don’t believe you’re sincerely unaware of the calls to censor misinformation in media; and we literally just explained which media companies based in politically biased bubbles we were discussing.
im trying to understand what is being argued here.
the person i responded to said it was a fact that "a chorus of coastal media types" are "asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum"
the comment said this was a fact. and i still don't think thats a fact.
now in this comment you say they're sending "calls to censor misinformation in media"--then sure. are you implying that journalists should be forced to report misinformation? and if they choose _not_ to report misinformation, they're censoring?
“Oh, those calls I already knew about, but pretended not to?”
This is why I think you’re being disingenuous.
Your comment about misinformation ignores that what they call “misinformation” is merely information they don’t like — eg, when they censored the Hunter Biden story during an election, while calling for Republicans and news outlets (eg, NY Post) who told the truth to be deplatformed.
Your vapid replies pretending not to recognize that as censorship are as in poor faith as saying that North Korea can’t be an oppressive autocracy because “democratic republic” is in the name.
We should be very skeptical of claims of "censorship" and "deplatforming" from a corporation that literally has its own press and can manufacture its own platform.
Twitter chose to block the Post's story as factually incorrect because they were skeptical of it. That's their choice, much as the Post can choose not to trust a source. Twitter were wrong, but media outlets are sometimes wrong (for example, https://nypost.com/tag/correction/).
The Post is right to criticize Twitter's error, but any claims that Twitter lacked the right to make that call is, well, chipping at the rights the Post itself enjoys of control over its own pages. The Post can't force Twitter to run their stories any more than anyone should have the right to force the Post itself to quash the laptop story; both editorial authorities stem from the same freedom of the press.
Yes — that’s correct: Twitter censored a politically hot story they didn’t like during an election, silencing discussion of the Bidens’ illicit foreign dealings not only from the NY Post, but among all their users.
That’s my point: censorship invariably is these “mistakes” of censoring truth you dislike rather than any noble purpose. Indeed, the whole pretense of noble purpose is precisely so you can make these ignoble “mistakes” with a clear conscience — you were trying to protect the community! …why is everyone complaining the outcome was censoring your political rivals during an election?
You ignored me in the other thread:
People have been making these same arguments in favor of censorship for millennia; can you give a historic example (pre-1900) where people censoring were on the right side of history?
> can you give a historic example (pre-1900) where people censoring were on the right side of history?
I don't know why you're constraining the time frame to pre-1900, but sure.
From 1899 prior, almost every time a newspaper decided not to report something that they believed was false. Because by and large, newspapers do a pretty good job of separating the wheat from the chaff and reporting stories that at least seem to be true. What they don't do is report, without editorial insight, everything they could. They don't publish every letter to the editor, they don't run every story a reporter chases, and they never have. Filtering is part of their job. We remember the errors in filtering (especially if it's a good newspaper because they will report a retraction or correction) but there isn't too terribly much evidence in black and white of the dozens of decisions editors make to not amplify the noise. Obviously, since it didn't end up in a paper.
There are people in the world who believe the Earth is flat. Nobody is under any obligation to spread that belief. I'm not saying Twitter should start censoring discussion of flat Earth, but it's up to them if they choose to.
I guess the result is it wouldn't be a very welcoming channel for discussion of flat Earth topics. Nothing really lost there, I guess someone will have to set up a forum for it.
But Twitter isn’t a newspaper: they’re an aggregation and communication service who chose to censor what other people were allowed to communicate in a way that benefitted them politically — and who is not in the process of expressing regular editorial control of publication. (Unless you’re claiming that it’s not user content…?)
I also wouldn’t be holding up 1880-1900 journalism as an example of accuracy — you’re describing the period of salacious Jack the Ripper stories. Is that your best example of censorship working out positively — that tabloid era in journalism?
I’m asking you where this has led to positive things; not contesting the rights of Twitter.
But actually, I think there is something lost when Twitter no longer hosts flat Earth debates: the ability to convincingly explain why the Earth isn’t flat requires practice and refinement; and to know that the Earth isn’t flat requires we allow the idea to be challenged.
You don’t seem able to think of a case that censors showed a clear benefit to society — but there’s several in the past few years where they haven’t:
- Hunter Biden story may as well have been election interference
- somehow, deaths are spiking beyond COVID — quite possibly as a result of COVID policies; we never had a genuine debate over what to do
- similarly, multiple countries have pulled COVID vaccines for kids due to the risk of myocarditis… which has been known all along, but was censored from discussion
I was hoping to see a convincing historic example, cut free from modern politics so I could assess it fairly — but there don’t seem to be any examples where censorship generated positives to offset the huge negatives I see happening at present.
> You don’t seem able to think of a case that censors showed a clear benefit to society — but there’s several in the past few years where they haven’t:
Not under the rules you specified, no. I'm not a scholar of newspaper history.
After 1900, I can invoke the history of the FCC. By regulating access to the finite resource of bandwidth, they created an interesting circumstance: what you could say on television was regulated because your license could be revoked for failure to uphold a standard that protected the American living room. And for a long, long time: it worked! It worked quite well. There was a broad variety of television and radio available, it was broadly inoffensive, It generally reported the truth and / or was entertaining, and it had a certain national cohesion promotion effect that we've utterly lost in this era of unregulated mass communication. Speaking of, those regulations began to be undermined in the Reagan era, which is when Saturday morning cartoons became feature length commercials for toys. It's hard for me to claim that's an improvement over the previous regulations.
Could you get everything? Not from television. And that was fine. If somebody wanted to broadcast a message, they either needed a sympathetic ear in the media or they needed to own a station.
And that's the key thing, because when you use the term censorship, you're not talking about censorship. You've been consistently talking about who has control over broadcast. You've been consistently calling a private company's decision to not rebroadcast a signal sent to them "censorship" as if we should have any right to the resources of a private corporation. If anything, Twitter looks like a broadcast channel sitting on a non-finite resource. Since the resource is not finite, the government lacks the interest in regulating who uses it that it had for airwaves, which is fine. But those who demand some sort of fairness in how it chooses what it retransmits are asking for a massive prior restraint on its freedom to do with its service what it will that has no precedent. And the precedent it sets opens a huge can of worms.
If some government authority can mandate Twitter has to discuss flat earth, can they also mandate it has to give a platform to Nazis? That'll be incompatible with the law of several countries, for starters. It's also broadly incompatible with the American tradition of the press. You can't force NBC to platform Nazis. You can't force the New York times to give Nazis column inches. What the (US) government is restrained from doing is shutting down the Nazi newspaper and preventing the Nazi candidate from applying to the ballot using the same rules that every candidate does. Nowhere does the law require us to allow them to use our resources to promote their message. Not even a billboard operator is required to do business with them, no matter how green their money is... The law just prevents the government from restraining them from setting up their own billboard under the general rules of billboards.
Twitter belongs to Twitter and none of us have the right to force it to retransmit any damn thing we say. Their pipes, their storage, their servers, their rules. We should host a blog if we don't like it.
if an organization chooses not to use its voice to spread misinformation, thats not censorship.
is it censorship when my weather app _chooses_ not to say it’s snowing when it’s 103 out?
that’s absurd.
one of the links posted above said some americans believe that all sides should be reported equally. again that’s
stupid. not just silly, it’s stupid. “all” sides? these muppets believe “all” sides deserve equal weight, always?
People used to, after midnight bury a toads leg under an oak tree on the third full moon believing it would cure cancer.
are people now arguing that medical journals should be required to include this next to all cancer research? that it should be covered equally with the same weight? that’s stupid.
is it censorship if a journal doesn’t include woo crazy nonsense? no, it’s an editorial choice.
you can attack me and call my posts vapid all you like, but i was asking for more clarification from vague posts making extraordinary vague claims about some vague “chorus of coastal media types”
You asked explicitly what the other person was implying. If you ask that and then say that you weren't asking about any subtext, then one of us has some misunderstanding about the meaning of these words—and that person is not me.
(This comment by me, for example, is definitely imbued with subtext.)
Separately, put some effort into your attempts to have a discussion, please. I.e., beyond the bare minimum that it takes to type one or two sentences and press "reply" without giving it much more thought.
Yes. The entire question is predicated on there being a subtext. I answered that: assume the words they wrote were what they meant. Believing that "[what] they meant" was something besides that or that there was something else that "they were implying" is to believe that there was a subtext by definition.
neither of these at all show that a "...chorus of coastal media types..." (still waiting for an honest definition of this) are "...asking for people they disagree with to be prevented from speaking in any public forum."
You asked for the definition of "coastal media" type and got one. You need your own definition of "chorus" or whether it applies in a given context.
I'm sorry you don't think the definition is "honest" -- whatever can that possibly mean? It's the definition. You may not like the word, but even words you don't like have definitions. Even dishonest slurs have a meaning, they are not random sounds, even if you don't like the meaning.
