721–730 of 851 posts
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Well said. It's always funny when some acronym no one's heard of shows up unexplained on HN.
Two things: First, don't assume that just because you've never heard a word, that means no one has heard of it. There are quite a lot of us who know what the fediverse is. Second, and this is a little pedantic, fediverse is a portmanteau, not an acronym.
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Okay come on. This sequence of comments is funny, you have to admit. "Google is censoring apps" "It's because those apps can access hate speech" "You can use this other app store" "They ban this app, though" "But that's because it's for hate speech" Come on, this is peak comedy.
> those apps can access hate speech > it's for hate speech There's a big difference here and you seem to know it
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A reminder that F-Droid banned Gab from their store. https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/
They banned the Gab _application_. They didn't ban all microblogging applications that can access Gab. Though, Tusky in particular does. Not all do.
> 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…
It's quite disputable that google even has the right to a platform of anywhere near their current power and influence (waiting for antitrust law to be enforced) and the distinction in any case seems quite artificial when google buys politicians and receives significant public funding and such.
The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps, because some of the microblogging sites that can be accessed via Fediverse have this kind of content. Based on this rationale, I look forward to Google Play removing Chrome, Firefox, and all other web browsers from the store as well.
This sort of decision by Google does make me rather uncomfortable (the entire situation is uncomfortable... https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr... ). But it's worth understanding why the situation may be a bit more complicated than is described above. What seems to be happening is not an absolute ban on Fediverse apps , but a ban on specific implementations that make it easy to join specific…
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It's the side effect of allowing a small number of largely unregulated companies to control so much of our communications. TV and radio using public right-of-ways like radio bands are much more tightly regulated to ensure "equal time". That's not the case for social media or mobile platforms and I suspect any attempt to regulate those would be met with a great deal of resistance. Not the least complaint would be that…
I am very anti-social-media-regulation. Partly for the reasons you mention and partly because I see greater regulation balkanizing the internet and driving us increasingly farther from the promise of an egalitarian open internet. As for alternatives, I think we just need people to collectively decide that some other platform (ideally a decentralized one) is better than the incumbent. Facebook depends on its inertia.…
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The equal time doctrine was eliminated in 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine >> The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC's view—honest, equitable, and balanced. The FCC e…
And for good reason. It doesn't make sense to mandate equal time for mainstream and fringe positions, rational proposals and ones riddled with contradictions. Either some government censor is responsible for deciding which positions are "serious" enough to warrant equal time or the media eventually gets overwhelmed with nonsense and conspiracy theories. If you want to see where the "fairness doctrine" leads, just hav…
On TV or radio, you can only have so many stations. But with the internet, people can make a new web site and publish there, they're not limited by the available spectrum. Therefore, the kind of regulation that was needed in a constrained environment (broadcasted TV/Radio), does not really make sense when those constraints are lifted.
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I really don't get that logic. Of course, everyone agrees that hate speech is bad (and so are a lot of things, but I digress). But how is it not censorship when one of the world's most powerful companies does it? Do they get a free pass because they are governed by shareholders and make a lot of money? I can see how it's not censorship if Bob does not want people to post things he disagrees with on his cat picture fo…
It's a question of what is meant by the term censorship. In the strictest sense, moderation and censorship are very often the same thing. If for instance, I post something terrible in a comment on here, and the administration of HN deletes that comment, then that's censorship. However, when most people talk about censorship they're using it not in the strict sense, but rather as a shorthand for someone violating thei…
It's like other countries only exist as rhetorical devices for most of HN. If you actually used the fediverse you'll see that there are plenty of Chinese users on it criticizing the state. It's the Western fediverse users being censored for wrongthink this time. Even the creator of Mastodon straight up doesn't believe in free speech wrt. to certain far right beliefs.
> 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…