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Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

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Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#641

Post by JoshTriplett »

kortex wrote: post #149
ianleeclark wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, yeah, many of us get a bit worked up when people are kicked off platforms, because they are being silenced, sometimes to the point of being shut out of the modern internet entirely (when their rights to a DNS address are comprehensively removed). Why is it bad that were refusing to let something like stormfront operate in polite society? Your free speech absolutism is dangerous. You can't debate an inherently b…

Such a tough subject. The problem is this tactic is consistently agaisnt many dissident publications, often on pro-democratic ones by autocratic countries. So what/where do you draw the line for "this speech is unacceptable so we won't propagate DNS entries for it", and who draws it? USA? ICANN? The host country? Each DNS gets to pick and choose? Going in the other direction, if this speech is so bad, why don't ISP's…

There's an extremely easy line to draw: "if you run the server, you make the rules".

If you run a DNS server, you're free to refuse to carry any record you want. And people are free to use or not use your DNS server, based on its policies. (There are various DNS servers that purport to block ads and malware, for instance.)

If you run a blog, you can choose to not allow comments at all, or moderate them as you see fit. If someone wants to reply in a way you don't want to host, they can respond via their own blog.

If you run a hosting company, you can (and should) refuse to host spammers, malware, people launching DDoS attacks, and so on.

If you run an email server, you can choose to reject spam.

Many interesting and desirable policies happen at the meta-level, based on that fundamental principle along with freedom of association. People will choose which servers to use based on the nature and quality of moderation; it's one of the defining aspects of a service.

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#642

Post by [deleted] »

danShumway wrote: post #224
VBprogrammer wrote: post #101

Can this even be considered a free speech issue? They aren't deleting his tweet, only displaying it alongside a fact check. Of course you can try to call into question the impartiality of the fact check but that is a long way from not deciding not to show the content.

Not only does it not seem to be a free speech issue to me, from my point of view this is basically the best-case scenario for avoiding censorship of contentious issues on dominant platforms like Facebook/Twitter. It's the obvious conclusion to arguments like, "the way to deal with bad speech is with more good speech." Twitter saw speech they disagreed with, and they fixed it with more speech. They haven't censored an…

[deleted]

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#643

Post by Veen »

kitd wrote: post #605
0x5002 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have struggled with both points of the argument for a while now. In general, I'm inclined to agree with your assessment that this would be a glaring overreach on the side of the feds. It's also apparent that social networks have a tendency to cater massively to one side of the increasingly divided political spectrum, as proven with experiments like Gab. I've always liked the idea of having a Twitter clone that base…

FWIW, the BBC World Service podcast "The Compass" [1] has an excellent series on free speech by the veteran BBC journalist Robin Lustig. I highly recommend it. He covers tech companies, universities, blasphemy laws, etc. [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p035w97h/episodes/downloads For me, free speech is fundamentally about trying to rectify the injustice of an imbalance of power between those in authority and t…

> Those right-wingers who love to proclaim themselves champions of free speech are really objecting to the Tyranny of the Majority. That is not an authority that requires a rebalancing of power. It is just an established opinion.

A tyranny of the majority—which you appear not to understand is a bad thing[0]—is a disaster and precisely what modern democratic institutions seek to avoid. It always leads to the repression of minorities, whether that's ethnic minorities, religious minorities, or political minorities. I doubt you would be much in favor of tyranny by a majority of a different political persuasion.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#644

Post by philipkglass »

I think that "fighting terrorist propaganda" is actually the origin of social media building tools for moderating politics. Most people seem to date it to the 2016 US presidential election, presumably because they weren't following Middle East politics as closely as US politics.

I really saw a chilling effect in r/SyrianCivilWar after the rise of ISIS. Media showing graphic violence would remain on the site for several more years -- r/WatchPeopleDie was removed only last year -- but videos considered to be "supporting" ISIS (even if only because they showcased recent advances by ISIS or allies) started being removed from Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and other places. I think that even LiveLeak eventually started removing some of these videos. Reddit itself started banning pro-ISIS posters.

There was plenty of all-sides hand-wringing before 2016 that social media wasn't doing enough to suppress terrorist propaganda.

"After the recent spate of terrorist attacks inspired by the so-called Islamic State, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called for greater cooperation from social media companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in combating hate propaganda."

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/08/how-social-media-cos-try-to-...

The social networks banned a lot of content that would be legal to publish in the United States. They went well above and beyond removing only the "imminent lawless action" speech that falls outside of First Amendment protections. And with good reason. Plenty of lawmakers were ready to make their lives miserable if they didn't take an aggressive anti-terrorist stance.

It's fun to daydream about big American social media companies removing only such speech as would be unprotected by the First Amendment. But sites like YouTube have never offered that much latitude. Even in the pre-Google days YouTube didn't allow porn -- not even perfectly legal, mainstream porn. And of course it's perfectly legal to advertise locksmith and dental services but I don't want platforms overrun with high volume advertising for those businesses either. Finally, both Republican and Democratic legislators were talking less than 5 years ago about how social media had a responsibility to curb terrorists' propaganda, regardless of the stronger protections enshrined in the First Amendment.

I don't really like where we are with social media, but I wish that the discussions we had around these issues on HN were more historically grounded instead of centering on partisan polarization around the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath.

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#645

Post by NewEntryHN »

Loughla wrote: post #261
itchyjunk wrote: post #151

Hm, is fact checking solved problem? I remember someone here had their game flagged just because it referenced SARS-CoV-2. I hear almost daily horror stories of youtube algo's screwing up content creator. As a human, I still struggle a lot to read a paper and figure out what I just read. On top of that, things like the GPT2 from OpenAI might generate very human like comment. Is there no way to consider social media a…

> Ask some oracle what "fact" is and shun every other point of view? This statement concerns me, greatly. Its implication is that facts are merely point of view statements. That is just, well, it's just wrong. Facts are facts. The truth is the truth. They don't care what your beliefs are. If it is empirically true, then it is true. Why and when did it become okay to hand-wave and dismiss anything you didn't believe i…

You are talking about the conceptual notion of a "fact", which is out of human reach. Outside of mathematics, labelling anything as a fact is an opinion, and the label is considered okay as long as everyone involved has a high confidence about this opinion.

For example, if you let an apple fall down to the ground and you say "The apple fell to the ground", then you can't really know whether it's a fact or not, because you don't have access to the official logs of the Universe where it would be recorded that "An apple fell to the ground". So you have to trust your senses (and for example the fact that you're not under hallucination or visualizing an illusion) to put some confidence into this belief. If you know you're not under drug usage and if there are other witnesses of the event, then you'll have a very high degree of confidence into the idea that the apple indeed fell on the ground, so much confidence that you would consider it a fact.

When it comes to complex questions about society and everything that we can read on the news, such degree of confidence is very rare. In the end, the threshold at which you consider something to be "a fact" is subjective and for this reason I think all this "facts aren't opinions" thing is dangerous, because it gives the illusion that what we call "facts" are absolute and binary, whereas it's often things we just have a high confidence about, and so it opens the door to slide our standard of what a fact is.

What matters is that our view of the world shouldn't be shaped by what we hope or believe the world _should_ be, but by what it really _seems_ to be. And that is sufficient enough without having to get on one's high horse with "facts".

I don't question the casual usefulness of the word "fact" in appropriate contexts, but when the discussion at hand precisely handles the very nature of what is a fact and what isn't, we need to dig down the true implications of the word.

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#646

Post by nraynaud »

anewdirection wrote: post #583
nraynaud wrote: post #283

In a lot of European countries nazi speech is forbidden, and I would posit that it works: the police murders less minorities, the difference in earnings and life expectancy are narrower, and generally violent deaths are lower. Maybe it's time for the US to become a member of the international community, by adopting common codes.

So censoring hitler online means less police violence? Please do show me the data. Baseless nationalism is just as unwelcome from any country as it is fron the USA. Stop it.

"Europe" is not a nation, this word is like garlic for the nationalists.

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#647

Post by three_seagrass »

gameswithgo wrote: post #602
mathdev wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fact check would be fine if it led to objective analyses of some sort, or even Wikipedia. But when I clicked it, it displayed some highly partisan sources, including a CNN article with its usual "Trump bad" vitriol. Maybe it was an algorithm's fault, but it didn't work at all.

How do you objectively report on trump without it painting him in a bad light?

One way is showing what multiple experts and news sources say about the facts, such as the Washington Post, The Hill, Forbes, the ACLU, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, ABC News, Fortune Magazine, Vox, MSNBC, Huffington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor.

Which Twitter did - https://twitter.com/i/events/1265330601034256384

This focus on complaining about just CNN is a red herring.

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#648

Post by FillardMillmore »

mamon wrote: post #620
mathdev wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fact check would be fine if it led to objective analyses of some sort, or even Wikipedia. But when I clicked it, it displayed some highly partisan sources, including a CNN article with its usual "Trump bad" vitriol. Maybe it was an algorithm's fault, but it didn't work at all.

In which alternative universe is Wikipedia objective? From my experience it is far-left, sometimes deliberately spreading fake news if it fits their narrative. This is especially visible in articles about politicians and historical events.

I thought Wikipedia was built on user contributions and user provided citations? Do you have any sources that would indicate that the Wikimedia Foundation is far left?

If it truly was far left, why doesn't Wikipedia host pages of Pol Pot and Stalin filled with praise? Or, in lieu of praise, at least apologism?

Re: Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

#650

Post by mcfly1985 »

localhost wrote: post #570
0x5002 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have struggled with both points of the argument for a while now. In general, I'm inclined to agree with your assessment that this would be a glaring overreach on the side of the feds. It's also apparent that social networks have a tendency to cater massively to one side of the increasingly divided political spectrum, as proven with experiments like Gab. I've always liked the idea of having a Twitter clone that base…

Here is the entire text of the first amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Note that it says that CONGRESS cannot make a law that abridges freedom of speech. It says nothin…

I'm old enough to remember when the left was up in arms because a private bakery didn't wish to bake a cake for a gay couple. It's hilarious watching those same people now argue in support of twitter. They must all be oblivious to their cognitive dissonance.
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