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Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech

nytimes.com

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Re: Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech

#41

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

brandmeyer wrote: post #33
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the unspoken sentiment behind your experience. "I took to facebook to post links to grey legal documents rather than hosting them myself because I wanted facebook to be liable; Im shocked when they told me they didn't appreciate the transfer of risk. It's literally censorship I tell you!" Freedom of speech is not, and hopefully never will be,"freedom to post on other people's servers unmoderated".

At least for me, the freedoms enshrined in the bill of rights and other amendments are valuable not just as restrictions on government power, but as restrictions on power. The more asymmetric the relationship between two parties, the more sensitive we become to exercises of power by the stronger party over the weaker one. I think that we do have a reasonable expectation that our employers and service providers won't…

The restrictions put on governmental power are proportional to the power we give the government. Your employer can't imprison you, collect taxes from you, send you off to war; pretending "social media add tech company" is in any way comparable doesn't add much to the conversation. You first have to give google the right to send you to jail, before you can demand due process from them (that's a dystopia I think no one wants, not even the tech CEOs).

If you don't like the policies for Google, Facebook, others, make your own. Maybe like minded individuals will follow (most likely they won't). Once you no longer have this right then we can talk about censorship.

Re: Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech

#43

Post by PurpleBoxDragon »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #12
notveryrational wrote: post #2

Having been censored multiple times by tech firms, I fall squarely into one camp. During the Snowden Disclosures, I took to Facebook with the documents getting published and started to do my own summaries. Facebook implemented a policy in which it would not let any post that contained a link to a Snowden Document. In some cases they would let the content get posted, but I confirmed with a friend's account that it was…

I love the unspoken sentiment behind your experience. "I took to facebook to post links to grey legal documents rather than hosting them myself because I wanted facebook to be liable; Im shocked when they told me they didn't appreciate the transfer of risk. It's literally censorship I tell you!" Freedom of speech is not, and hopefully never will be,"freedom to post on other people's servers unmoderated".

Freedom of speech is a much larger broader concept than the First Amendment.

Consider for a second if some political position was banned by all privately owned mediums in the US. Say for example it was reported on the violence is Bangladesh. Every internet provider would stop transferring data if it detected any mention of it, every server hosting data in any format would immediately remove any mention of it, Microsoft, Google, and Apple pushed updates to their OS's that would terminate what you were doing if they detected it.

Would freedom of speech (not the First Amendment) have been attacked in such a far-fetched scenario? Yes, despite it only being private companies doing things they have the right to do. As such, we can conclude that in such a scenario, freedom of speech includes requiring private entities to support a message they wish to not support. Now, would that not also apply in a less far-fetched scenario? I see no reason it would not.

Re: Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech

#44

Post by ratsmack »

grandmczeb wrote: post #16
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the unspoken sentiment behind your experience. "I took to facebook to post links to grey legal documents rather than hosting them myself because I wanted facebook to be liable; Im shocked when they told me they didn't appreciate the transfer of risk. It's literally censorship I tell you!" Freedom of speech is not, and hopefully never will be,"freedom to post on other people's servers unmoderated".

> It's literally censorship I tell you! It literally is. Most people would say that is justifiable given that Facebook owns the platform, but that dosen't change the fact that they're censoring what users say.

And everyone seems to be fine with the censorship, until it is their own worldview that is censored.

"First the came for the ..."

Re: Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech

#47

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

grandmczeb wrote: post #16
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the unspoken sentiment behind your experience. "I took to facebook to post links to grey legal documents rather than hosting them myself because I wanted facebook to be liable; Im shocked when they told me they didn't appreciate the transfer of risk. It's literally censorship I tell you!" Freedom of speech is not, and hopefully never will be,"freedom to post on other people's servers unmoderated".

> It's literally censorship I tell you! It literally is. Most people would say that is justifiable given that Facebook owns the platform, but that dosen't change the fact that they're censoring what users say.

Moderation != censorship. When facebook can send you to jail for your speech, then we can talk about censorship. I don't want to live in a world where I can't ban bad actors from my own servers (thus violating my freedom of speech).

Re: Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech

#48

Post by ryandrake »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #12
notveryrational wrote: post #2

Having been censored multiple times by tech firms, I fall squarely into one camp. During the Snowden Disclosures, I took to Facebook with the documents getting published and started to do my own summaries. Facebook implemented a policy in which it would not let any post that contained a link to a Snowden Document. In some cases they would let the content get posted, but I confirmed with a friend's account that it was…

I love the unspoken sentiment behind your experience. "I took to facebook to post links to grey legal documents rather than hosting them myself because I wanted facebook to be liable; Im shocked when they told me they didn't appreciate the transfer of risk. It's literally censorship I tell you!" Freedom of speech is not, and hopefully never will be,"freedom to post on other people's servers unmoderated".

While it’s well within Facebook’s rights to censor content that appears on their platform, it’s also within OP’s rights to call out their attempts to whitewash and sanitize their little part of the Internet.

It seems HN readership likes to stand up and defend these companies when they get rid of stuff we don’t like, like Nazis and Alex Jones rants. But if we woke up tomorrow and FB or YouTube started deleting content about progressive causes, we’d lose our minds and start sharpening the pitchforks. The double standard is evident. Either these guys should have editorial control of what they publish or not.

Re: Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech

#49

Post by um_ya »

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #43
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the unspoken sentiment behind your experience. "I took to facebook to post links to grey legal documents rather than hosting them myself because I wanted facebook to be liable; Im shocked when they told me they didn't appreciate the transfer of risk. It's literally censorship I tell you!" Freedom of speech is not, and hopefully never will be,"freedom to post on other people's servers unmoderated".

Freedom of speech is a much larger broader concept than the First Amendment. Consider for a second if some political position was banned by all privately owned mediums in the US. Say for example it was reported on the violence is Bangladesh. Every internet provider would stop transferring data if it detected any mention of it, every server hosting data in any format would immediately remove any mention of it, Microso…

Freedom of speech is a principle. Some people seem to forget that.

Re: Gatekeepers or Censors? How Tech Manages Online Speech

#50

Post by pavel_lishin »

aldoushuxley001 wrote: post #40
pavel_lishin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't moderator power, it's name squatting. Do you have a concrete suggestion for giving the moderators less power, while still ensuring that subreddits don't get overrun with trolls? Keep in mind that physical in-world minorities can amplify their voices vastly online. Sometimes this is something we want (by allowing, e.g., African-Americans to point out systemic injustice) and sometimes it's not (Fascis…

I'd rather enable users to moderate their own content by giving them better tools to do so. Reddit simply isn't built for this though, because they've already committed to the subreddit model. Ultimately though, I believe reddit's successor will find success going this route. So it's less about giving more power to minorities (which are still just groups) and more about giving power to individuals to manage their own…

> I'd rather enable users to moderate their own content by giving them better tools to do so.

I hear where you're coming from, but I subscribe to a small amount of subreddits, and moderate one - and I am absolutely not willing to clean up after every troll, shill and bot that posts to all of them.

As a specific example, I moderate a local meetup subreddit. We have fairly specific rules about what is and isn't allowed, and our subreddit is better for it - because people aren't allowed to just link to random events in the city, we require that they be events that they are actively interested in attending. (The rationale is twofold - one, people won't just spam links to their events, and two, attendees will find at least one person they can connect to instead of attending alone, which can be somewhat daunting.)

If we, as moderators didn't do this, we'd have to rely on every user to "clean up" our subreddit for us. Those that didn't care to would find our subreddit useless, since it would be filled with links to garbage Facebook events, meetup.com sales pitches, and ads for competing subreddits and apps. Those that did, well, they'd have to do the work that we do.

Why should we ask that of people? It's like opening up a dance club, but telling everyone that it's BYOB, and BYOmusic, and BYOchair if you get tired, and also you gotta bring a broom if you want the dance floor to not be full of garbage. At that point, what's our value-add?

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