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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

#191

Post by danso »

goatinaboat wrote: post #174
danso wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which contemporary examples (i.e. within the last 50 years) are you referring to? Journalists have been threatened with imprisonment for protecting sources from government subpoena. But the sanction is for refusing a court order, not because of the publication content. https://archives.cjr.org/opening_shot/opening_shot_july_augu... And in any case, a publisher is different than a utility or a platform. Social media u…

If it is as your say why would you object to Mark Zuck being personally liable for all content posted on Facebook? If anyone slanders anyone else and his platform publishes and disseminates it, why should he not be considered responsible?

How would a law that holds Zuckerberg responsible in the fashion you describe not be applicable to every website operator and Internet service provider?

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

#192

Post by AnthonyMouse »

FussyZeus wrote: post #103
JediWing wrote: post #63

Know what else distorts the marketplace of ideas? Money. Money allows for buying advertisements, essentially allowing you to buy a platform to spread your ideas. Having money typically has a pretty clear bias: protecting the money of those who have it. This comes at the expense, many times, of those who do not. That typically equates to conservative policies. I'm not convinced that the market distortion caused by sup…

This was a big part of why I enjoyed Jack Dorsey's comments on Twitter removing political advertising. The Internet was supposed to be a democratizing force, and it was, for awhile. To an extent it still is, but as the convergence of content continues to pull people into the various Platforms™, all of which are supported by advertiser dollars, the content itself is diluted. Some not so much, some so much it's not rec…

We need to think about why advertising is winning.

A big reason is that advertising is a tax deduction. If I fund my content with advertising, the advertiser gets to deduct the money they spend from their income tax. If I sell content to users, the users don't get to do that. Between the employer and employee halves of FICA, federal withholding and state income tax, that's typically more than half the money. To make it even we would either need a tax deduction for purchasing content or to get rid of the one for buying advertising.

Then you have companies like Apple taking a 30% cut of the creator's revenue. The customer has to pay $1.43 in order for the creator to get $1. That's obviously making direct purchases less competitive against advertising -- and it multiplies with the tax treatment. If you're paying 50% in tax and then 30% to Apple, the customer needs to earn ~$2.86 for every $1 they want the creator to get. If two content creators start with $1 and use it buy each other's content, by the time the money goes to the other person and back one time, what's left is only ~$0.12.

It would be a lot easier to sell content if the creators actually got the lion's share of the customer's money.

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

#193

Post by gdulli »

hnal943 wrote: post #64
gdulli wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. If you broaden the term "censorship" so much as to make it equivalent to any entity trying to enforce quality or relevance control standards in its own venue, you make the term useless. While also subverting conversation about actual censorship, cheapening it.

I'm not certain there's a strict line between "actual" censorship and OP's definition. Care to give a definition you think is defensible as "actual" censorship?

Sure, it's hard to draw a strict line that will make everyone happy. I'm not going to try. But that doesn't mean that removing ED pill spam should be conflated with the government banning books under threat of imprisonment. We live in a messy world and have to fall back on using our judgment and common sense, flawed as they are.

It's obtuse to pretend that it's confusing why one is acceptable and the other isn't. And it's not helpful to say that the lack of an unambiguous, unanimously accepted definition means that certain clearly reasonable actions can't be taken.

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

#194

Post by goatinaboat »

danso wrote: post #191
goatinaboat wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is as your say why would you object to Mark Zuck being personally liable for all content posted on Facebook? If anyone slanders anyone else and his platform publishes and disseminates it, why should he not be considered responsible?

How would a law that holds Zuckerberg responsible in the fashion you describe not be applicable to every website operator and Internet service provider?

It would not be applicable to those who only “censored” illegal material in response to a court order. The difference being whether the operator decides to “censor” content themselves for their own reasons/agenda.

Same as newspaper vs postal service.

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

#196

Post by repolfx »

root_axis wrote: post #88
giancarlostoro wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship on spam is probably agreed upon by everyone but spammers. Censorship on the opinions of people is dangerous on the other hand. Like I say on HN many times: today it's the opinions you disagree with that get censored, tomorrow it's your voice.

Do you consider it censorship when comments or articles are flagged on HN?

I don't, because you can still see such comments (it may require an account and flipping a switch). And in fact I browse Hacker News with showdead turned on, and I often start from /active so I can see stories and comments other people don't want me to see. This isn't censorship because Hacker News itself still makes them visible: it's more like spam filtering in that regard, where content is being categorised but not censored.

Spam filters in particular are not censorship because they are ultimately just labelling devices. Because of their accuracy many people often accept and act on those labels automatically, but they don't have to, and actually recently Gmail's filters got terrible and so I have to check my spam folder all the time now.

In some cases spam filters flat-out reject messages and don't even show them to the recipient, not even in a spam folder. I understand the technical reasons for that (full storage and processing of spam is expensive), but, that gets much much closer to the border of censorship, with the only real difference being one of intent.

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

#197

Post by pjkundert »

marcinzm wrote: post #81
gonational wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, the solution is simple: If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content or spam, they should have their “platform” status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher. This prevents such companies from using “platform” status as a cost saving mechanism to help them become large monopolies. Companies like Facebook would not have been able to take over so much of the market…

So no specialized platforms that cover a single topic or area? After all, then they'd need to delete off topic posts. What about user moderators deleting things? What about a mailing list owner enforcing guidelines? Or is all public online communication one giant unmanaged and unstructured sets of posts on everything and anything? Or, in reality, nothing but paid advertisements. edit: What about downvoting? Does that…

This problem has been solved for years, and yet no platforms implement it: K-Means Clustering

https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-k-means-cluster...

The property "interesting" is an individual decision. A forum like HN could implement K-Means Clustering instead of having dang madly moderating stuff. Over time, those HN users interested in "technologically interesting stuff" would aggregate together, and generally only see posts that are "voted up" by others in their cluster.

All the other crap would be seen by all those HN users that migrated over from 8chan.

The problem with this, of course, is that HN would be full of all sorts of sickening crap that you and I would never see (or, at least, until a small sampling of us saw it, and all down-voted it into the 8chan netherworld).

The great thing about this -- the FBI, et.al. would have much better tools to do their jobs: they could troll these seedy underbellies of HN, etc., and actually spear-phish and destroy the scum that is posting repellent garbage.

Or, we could carry on doing what we're doing, even though it can't work. Our choice.

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

#198

Post by P_I_Staker »

woopwoop wrote: post #28

Replace "censoring conservative viewpoints" with "censoring the nice people who tell me about how I can make $13,000 a week working from home". Which part of this argument changes? I can't find any part that does.

Conservative viewpoints are political ideals. Scams are scams. If you don't make that distinction, then Ponzi schemes become protected speech.

There's also a clear (direct) profit motive, and it's depriving people of property. There's lots of ways this argument changes. When you censor political views, you're depriving people of their rights. Shutting out a swindler isn't even close to the same thing.

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

#199

Post by commandlinefan »

root_axis wrote: post #88
giancarlostoro wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship on spam is probably agreed upon by everyone but spammers. Censorship on the opinions of people is dangerous on the other hand. Like I say on HN many times: today it's the opinions you disagree with that get censored, tomorrow it's your voice.

Do you consider it censorship when comments or articles are flagged on HN?

Depends on the case, but as far as I can tell, most of the time comments are flagged and removed, it's because too many people disagreed with the poster (including the HN moderators), rather than somebody spamming the site, so yeah, a lot of the moderation here is censorship in any way you could define it. You see this over and over again on public forums: a means of controlling spammers who are not actually participating in what the forum was designed for is introduced and is immediately abused by people who want to limit actual participation.

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

#200

Post by repolfx »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #59
gonational wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, the solution is simple: If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content or spam, they should have their “platform” status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher. This prevents such companies from using “platform” status as a cost saving mechanism to help them become large monopolies. Companies like Facebook would not have been able to take over so much of the market…

> If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content, they should have their “platform” status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher. What about spam? And would this extend to marketplaces? If a company allows users to sell educational resources for kids, what would happen if they start removing items that clearly don't fit?

Spam can be solved by just making it easy for people to spot when something was classified as spam, e.g. as spam folders do.
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