Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store • Hacker News Board

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#701

Post by Animats » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #678

thomascgalvin wrote: post #169

> Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government. To be fully accurate, this is absolutely censorship , but it's not a violation of anyone's First Amendment rights. People often conflate the two. We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so. An…

Constitutions are squishy things, ultimately. They evolve over the years. I take your point about legality. But, I'd make the point that we don't have a clear moral or legal concept of free speech that relates to the current world. "We can argue about whether or not Google should ban certain opinions on their platform, or where the line should be drawn, but it is arguable that hey have the legal right to do so." At s…

It also wouldn't stand. Something like this would be too contradictory to the moral concept of free speech.

I don't know. If Google decided to censor "hate speech" in GMail, could anyone stop them? Some people would applaud. Machine learning is good enough now that misspellings and euphemisms can be caught. So topic-based censorship could really work. Especially for Google, which has so much history on each sender, and so much experience with spam filtering.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#702

Post by heavyset_go » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

davexunit wrote: post #202

grahoho wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reminder that F-Droid banned Gab from their store. https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/

Yeah that ruled. Love F-Droid.

Agreed. Good decision on their part.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#703

Post by TempLogsForOne » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

IntelMiner wrote: post #256

croes wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a clever trick. Make the medium you want to censor a private property than it's legal.

And yet. There's a certain "side" that wants to have that both ways Private companies can't censor "bad opinions" But private companies can also arbitrarily refuse service for say, making a "gay wedding cake" How is this disconnect rationalized?

It's not a disconnect, you are simply not understanding because you are clearly very authoritarian minded.

The right to free speech is a God given right that the Constitution is the highest law of the land that prohibits the government from infringing on. Through the legal supremacy clause, the laws of the Constitution apply and supersede all other inferior laws and jurisdictions.

I actually agree though that the tech tyrants should be allowed to censor if they wish … once they built a private internet that is not using or funded by public resources. Problem solved, censor away. That would be akin to censoring someone in your own home, but you cannot censor someone outside of the home, because you are infringing on other's right to free speech. What you are actually doing is rationalizing that Google and all the other tech tyrants have the right to censor what you say in public … because the internet is public … it is not private unless it is operating solely on private resources … which NONE of them are. You are advocating to control others, what they want to say to others, regardless of whether you want to hear it. You are not only trying to control the speaker, but you are also trying to control the listener. It's not healthy.

As to your other authoritarian and tyrannical point; you are literally trying to force someone to do something against their will and yet you still cannot see anything wrong with that. It is not healthy, you are not healthy. You are in fact dangerous and evil in your desire to spread and impose harm on others and want to control others.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#704

Post by mgleason_3 » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #95

It always starts like that. People agree to very sensible things. Like hate speech is bad and it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government. Eventually the definition of hate or whatever it is that’s offensive is very removed from the original meaning, and now we all bear the brunt of the sensible people who with best intentions wanted to make things better.

>it’s not censorship if it’s not mandated by the government

Censorship can be conducted by private institutions, governments and other controlling bodies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#705

Post by djeiasbsbo » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

thelean12 wrote: post #626

jakelazaroff wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's bad faith to pretend that some random Fediverse server that allows unfettered hate speech has the same societal impact as the mountains of misinformation and bigotry that flourish on Twitter and Facebook, despite their half-hearted efforts to look like they're fighting it. Just look at the scale at which Facebook enables the distribution of right-wing propaganda: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/technology…

Have any of the Fediverse apps that were banned from the app store done anything to prevent the issues that you say Facebook and Twitter have? I'll take the simple banning of a harmful server on their app as a way to change my mind on this issue.

They have done exactly that multiple times. For example, the app Tusky has a hardcoded list of hate-speech instances for which the login is blocked, to just give you one example.

Other than that, the instances themselves simply choose not to federate with questionable instances. This happens in an almost organic way where if an instance refuses to block federation with another questionable instance, other instances will then also refuse to federate with that instance.

The result is a network where hate-speech and undesirable content has been almost organically filtered out.

But keep in mind that the (client) apps themselves are more like web browsers. Anyone can host their own website and access its content through one of these apps. This also means that instances which are blocked by an app can very easily circumvent that as well.

(Sorry for my bad english and repeatedly using the word "instances")

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#706

Post by sascha_sl » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

Whether or not you agree with the action taken here, Gab has provoked this behavior for years, by calling itself uncensorable and asking its users to fork and resubmit fediverse apps with minimal changes to explicitly circumvent the Play Store Guidelines (even apps that did not implement a block of Gab to begin with), so it is hard for me to feel bad for Gab.

That a few app developers have now been put in a position where they must implement the block is unfortunate. I always thought it was a good indicator of the developer's morals, but not much more.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#707

Post by godelski » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #556

godelski wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your ascii art is much better than mine and I'm not going to attempt it, but I agree with everything that you've said except for > I argue that we lack both mental and technological tools to cope with this. I do think we have the tools to solve these issues. I do not think the mental tools are in the hands of the average person (likely not even in most of your above average people because the barrier to entry is exce…

> Your ascii art is much better A skill honed in deep procrastination :). > I think 3 other things should be discussed as well. Strongly agreed with all three. > Dynamic problems (people often reduce things to static and try to turn positive sum games into zero sum. That's what I implicitly meant by talking (again and again) about feedback loops; problems with such loops are a subset of dynamic problems, and one very…

> (I only disagree with the "try to turn positive sum games into zero sum"; zero-sum games also require perceiving the feedback loops involved. And then there are negative-sum games.)

This is an often snipe I make to people talking about economics (I do agree with the lack of mention of negative sum games, but they also tend to be less common, at least in what people are about). Like the whole point of the economic game is to create new value where it didn't previously exist (tangent).

> Yup. Basic probability is taught to schoolchildren, but as a toy (or just another math oddity) rather than a tool for perceiving the world.

I think this is where we get a lot of "I'm not good at math" and "what is it useful for" discussion. Ironically everyone hates word problems, but at the heart of it that's what it is about.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#708

Post by heavyset_go » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:14 PM UTC

mqus wrote: post #445

daniel-s wrote: post #18

A reminder that F-Droid [1] is a free software app store that can be used to download free/open source software, including Mastodon clients. [1] https://f-droid.org/

I hope that this teaches more people that there are other, sometimes better app stores in android.

Hopefully it will. Although, Google engages in anticompetitive behavior by hindering 3rd party apps' abilities to autoupgrade, install in the background or batch install apps.

Those intentional limitations mean that F-Droid will never have feature parity with the Play Store.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#709

Post by betterunix2 » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:14 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #492

tsherr wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's precisely what they are doing. They don't care about hate speech. If they did, they wouldn't have Trump ads on the YouTube banner. This is justification to get rid of apps they don't like.

Not allowing a parties political ads would be clear favoritism in a political situation. You might not like Trump, but it's quite the jump to say republican ads are "hate speech." .. in fact that's quite literally weaponizing the word "hate speech" to censor political opinions you don't like.

[flagged]

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#710

Post by TempLogsForOne » Fri, Aug 28, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #421

jwalgenbach wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, not so much. The difference is in the legal definition of protected class. It is illegal to discriminate against someone based on their membership of a protected class -- ethnicity or disability for instance. Removing an opinion or banning a user based on violation of an agreed upon term of service is not the same thing. Having an opinion does not make you a member of a protected class, and a private corporatio…

I feel that the goalposts here have been shot out into space and are orbiting the barycenter where the point is. Let's maybe spell out separately whether or not these two situations are equivalent or not a) legally, b) ethically, c) in principle.

If you are referring to what I think you are, I agree. All of this abusive and manipulative argumentation about these things comes down to the fact that freedom is being curtailed more and more with every passing day, with people arguing more and more how "we just need to do one more thing to curtail people's freedom and then we are done" … but it's never enough and they are never done. There is always some other argument and reason to further add shackles to people's minds and ankles.

In the end, all of this only adds immense amounts of volatility and instability and totally unsustainable risk that will invariably blow up.

The Constitution was developed to allow people to live and associate and speak freely … that has been chipped away at for decades and even centuries now. It's sad and sick, and will only ever result in calamity as the USA, the only place on the planet where you used to at least be free, is being shackled by useful idiots who have no idea they are doing the will of the world dominating global ruling class.