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Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

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Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#151

Post by swebs »

driverdan wrote: post #147
Ajedi32 wrote: post #111

> For instance, if you’re a journalist and you want to promote your work, there is simply no viable alternative to Twitter at the moment. No other microblogging platform comes even close to having the number of users Twitter does, and most of the alternatives are hotbeds of extremism, so that anyone who joins them is thereby disqualified in polite company. IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging…

> IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging platform for fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company" I downvoted you because this is a ridiculous claim. If you use a platform like Gab that embraces bigots and extremists perhaps, but that's not the only other platform.

What are some other platforms?

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#152

Post by iron0013 »

buboard wrote: post #148
iron0013 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you think you're proving with that link. CDA 230 does something very close to the opposite of what you seem to think that it does. It protects the providers of interactive computer services from liability, but it does not restrict their control over whether to provide those services or not, which would of course obviously be a violation of those interactive computer services' first amendment rights.…

> it does not restrict their control this whole thread is about the hypothetical situation in which the two are linked by new laws

A hypothetical situation which could never arise, because the first amendment protects everyone, including both the users AND the operators of interactive computer services (such as HN, Reddit, Facebook, Google search, etc).

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#153

Post by MrEldritch »

swebs wrote: post #151
driverdan wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging platform for fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company" I downvoted you because this is a ridiculous claim. If you use a platform like Gab that embraces bigots and extremists perhaps, but that's not the only other platform.

What are some other platforms?

Mastodon comes to mind.

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#154

Post by [deleted] »

swebs wrote: post #151
driverdan wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging platform for fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company" I downvoted you because this is a ridiculous claim. If you use a platform like Gab that embraces bigots and extremists perhaps, but that's not the only other platform.

What are some other platforms?

[deleted]

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#155

Post by throwafkdl »

swebs wrote: post #151
driverdan wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging platform for fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company" I downvoted you because this is a ridiculous claim. If you use a platform like Gab that embraces bigots and extremists perhaps, but that's not the only other platform.

What are some other platforms?

Mastodon.

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#156

Post by akersten »

buboard wrote: post #143
roywiggins wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I run a website, why doesn't my free association right extend to kicking people off it?

you are absolutely free to - but in that case you should be held to the same legal standards as newspapers who edit their content.

No, that's patently ridiculous. The internet is a new medium; things scale so vastly differently here. Your proposal is literally impossible to enforce at the scale of major platforms. To force everyone to choose between "hands off, no moderation" and "you are responsible for all content" is a thinly veiled attempt to force the big players to not moderate, and therefore host extremist content - because they literally can't review everything.

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#157

Post by klyrs »

jerf wrote: post #118
klyrs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is that I, personally, have control over the blocking of the "make money fast" communication Have you never encountered a phpBB forum, or a wiki, or a social network, that doesn't have spam blockers? In my experience, such sites are inundated with spam, occasionally to the point that signal is hard to find over the noise. Your "solution" only touches on email. Filtering spam from such diverse sources…

As a pragmatist on this matter, I believe the solution here is scale. The control I have over a phpBB forum is that if I don't like their spam policy, I can leave, and either join another or form my own. We're not talking about a phpBB forum or a little blog with a few thousand commenters. We're talking about single companies with very significant fractions of the total discourse flowing through them. If Facebook blo…

> We're not talking about a phpBB forum or a little blog with a few thousand commenters.

I listed examples including "wikis" and "social media sites" which categorically contain the largest websites in the world. You'll find websites of all orders of magnitude from tens to millions of users -- where do you draw that line? But more importantly, are you under the impression that large-scale sites are somehow immune spammers?

> As a pragmatist on this matter, I believe the solution here is scale. The control I have over a phpBB forum is that if I don't like their spam policy, I can leave, and either join another or form my own.

I'm not understanding something here. You think that it's okay for spammers to implement a "heckler's veto" by de-facto shutting down every single niche website that (by law, presumably) accepts/rebroadcasts any and all submitted content -- that you'll be able to "vote with your feet" and move/create a site or forum that will somehow be immune to this onslaught? At what point is "scale" the answer? Bigger is better?

> As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced that something the size of Facebook can actually work in the long term [1].

I'm suffering whiplash. You gotta help me here. You're happy to feed small websites to the spamwolves, yes? But you're not convinced that big websites are good either. Do we just cancel the entire internet?

I'll grant that I'd probably get more work done.

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#158

Post by imgabe »

buzzkillington wrote: post #113
imgabe wrote: post #107

Instead of an ideological bias, what if it is just a demographic bias? The author supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds behind the scenes at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, picking and choosing what content is promoted. But the algorithms, at their most basic sense, promote what is popular. Based on voting records, in absolute numbers, there are simply more left-leaning people (at least in the US)…

>The author supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds behind the scenes at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, picking and choosing what content is promoted. But the algorithms, at there most basic sense, promote what is popular. Hardly. The algos have programmers thumbs on them heavily. A hilarious example was when Reddit was trying to deal with the_donald successfully spamming reddits hot algorithm. But…

That just proves my point. the_donald had to find an exploit and resort to spamming in order to get the algorithm to push them onto the front page. They couldn't get there on the basis of, you know, actually being popular because a large number of people want to read them.

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#159

Post by t-writescode »

driverdan wrote: post #147
Ajedi32 wrote: post #111

> For instance, if you’re a journalist and you want to promote your work, there is simply no viable alternative to Twitter at the moment. No other microblogging platform comes even close to having the number of users Twitter does, and most of the alternatives are hotbeds of extremism, so that anyone who joins them is thereby disqualified in polite company. IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging…

> IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging platform for fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company" I downvoted you because this is a ridiculous claim. If you use a platform like Gab that embraces bigots and extremists perhaps, but that's not the only other platform.

What if a video producer uses PornHub because YouTube keeps demonetizing them for, for example, gun reviews?

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#160

Post by driverdan »

buboard wrote: post #150
driverdan wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMO if you can't even try to use an alternative microblogging platform for fear of being labeled an extremist by "polite company" I downvoted you because this is a ridiculous claim. If you use a platform like Gab that embraces bigots and extremists perhaps, but that's not the only other platform.

i do have a colleague that would be shocked if i created a gab account.

As I said, Gab is an exception since they embrace the worst of humanity.
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