Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content

taibbi.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 340 posts

Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content

#181

Post by marcinzm »

jb775 wrote: post #150
marcinzm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is why I prefer these tools be used by private organizations to enforce their own private rules rather than being managed by government mandate. That ensures that enough social rules exist to maintain society but not rules which are so ingrained in law as to prevent progress or allow trivial total abuse.

When the private companies start getting billion dollar contracts with the government, or are lobbying politicians for laws massively benefitting the companies in the long run, it's safe to say the decisions behind the "private rules" will be impacted accordingly.

Nothing is a perfect system, I support the one I feel has the best chance of ensuring a stable but evolving society. Not restricting things has resulted in the governing body of the US getting attacked by an angry armed mob inside a federal government building. So that's not a viable option for a stable society. The government is both subject to changing political whims and has a history of overusing it's control in various situations. So that's not a viable option for an evolving society. Thus we get to the shitty but potentially best compromise option. Just like democracy itself.

Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content

#182

Post by julianmarq »

Thorrez wrote: post #157
emptyparadise wrote: post #46

My question to everyone supporting restrictions on speech and supporting privacy violations, even for good reasons, is this: are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands? The same methods used to quickly shut down a dangerous website or to track down a terrorist by their online posts can be used to silence protests and to hunt down political opposition.

>supporting restrictions on speech and privacy violations That's a confusing phrase. It took me a while to realize you meant "supporting privacy violations" rather than "supporting restrictions on privacy violations". You seem to be lumping speech restrictions and privacy violations into the same bucket, but I see them as very different, often even opposed to each other. The US elevates free speech higher than privac…

> You seem to be lumping speech restrictions and privacy violations into the same bucket, but I see them as very different, often even opposed to each other.

And yet today there was an article in the front page claiming that Signal is a problem because its end to end encryption can be used by anyone, even "bad actors", to communicate. That's an attack on both privacy and free speech, and I wouldn't be shocked if GP had that article (and others like it) in mind.

Mind you, most of the comments here rightfully called that article out for the absurd fear-mongering it was, and even the increasingly common censorship apologists were unusually silent. I was pleasantly surprised, even if it did still get a lot of upvotes and reached the front page.

Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content

#183

Post by bzbarsky »

ajkjk wrote: post #164
emptyparadise wrote: post #46

My question to everyone supporting restrictions on speech and supporting privacy violations, even for good reasons, is this: are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands? The same methods used to quickly shut down a dangerous website or to track down a terrorist by their online posts can be used to silence protests and to hunt down political opposition.

flatly, yes, that sounds like an good tradeoff. It seems unlikely to go wrong the other way, since people are mostly sane about this stuff and agree on what should be shut out (calls for violence, conspiratorial nutjob stuff, widespread misinformation). obviously the calculation would change if Putin-style misinformation was being defended by these people, but it's not.

I disagree about people being mostly sane about this stuff, for what it's worth. We may have very different filter bubbles....

Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content

#184

Post by dehrmann »

CivBase wrote: post #147

The constitution protects our freedom of speech from the government, not from private entities on their own private property. Make no mistake, that's what centralized social media platforms are - private property. Freedom of speech is not protected by the constitution on social media platforms and, frankly, I don't want 100% free speech on social media. Take a look at HN. HN mods do a brilliant job of moderating. We…

> not from private entities on their own private property.

Depends in the state. Free speech is protected in certain public parts of private property in California.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content

#185

Post by refurb »

nl wrote: post #108
revnode wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What rules do we put in place that they have to host some of this content? Blatant misinformation, vague encouragement of violence... hate? Why do they have to be rules? Why can't we have a culture of tolerance? Robots aren't running these companies. They're people, just like you and me. They can choose to be tolerant. Tolerance is about tolerating the most horrid things. Not because it's nice or those things have…

> Why can't we have a culture of tolerance? The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance. [1] If you haven't read Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies"…

I’m guess you haven’t read it? Because your summary is not accurate.

Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content

#186

Post by rootusrootus »

thisiscorrect wrote: post #145
bawolff wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IMHO the central question is: do you tolerate zones moderated (or not moderated at all) by their owners exactly how they want it, provided that you remain free to avoid any zone and also to create your own zone(s)? Is that not what we do currently? (subject to certain legal restrictions, but generally in usa the restrictions other than copyright are pretty light. And if they aren't, well Tor). You have pretty wide…

DNS registrars have also removed sites with views they don't like.

That's about where I would draw the line. Domain registration needs to be regulated or run by the gov't so that it can be protected by the first amendment. Pretty much everything else can be solved by enforcing antitrust laws so as to prevent one entity controlling too much of the space.

Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content

#187

Post by rootusrootus »

bloaf wrote: post #154
bawolff wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tools are these actually - the delete button? When it comes down to it - i like moderated spaces on the internet. I dont want to wade through spam, not to mention violent and abusive content. I don't like seeing shock images. So yes, i support having moderation. The question to me is not: yes/no moderation, its where you draw the line; what are your policies and how are they enforced. Fundamentally i think the s…

Competition makes it harder for malicious actors to manipulate everyone's content, but lets not pretend that companies don't know how to create the illusion of competition [1,2] We already have the problem of people creating too many filter-bubbles in their online lives. A fragmented social media environment will not usher in an age where everyone gets exposed to a more diverse set of ideas, we'll just get FoxNewsBoo…

Sure, but the goal isn't to prevent people from crafting their own filter bubbles, it's to prevent someone else from controlling bubbles not their own.

Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content

#188

Post by tspike »

shrimpx wrote: post #151
emptyparadise wrote: post #46

My question to everyone supporting restrictions on speech and supporting privacy violations, even for good reasons, is this: are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands? The same methods used to quickly shut down a dangerous website or to track down a terrorist by their online posts can be used to silence protests and to hunt down political opposition.

You can make the same argument in the opposite direction: for those who support unbridled electronic speech amplification, are you prepared for it to fall in the hands of people who are bent on changing minds en masse to fill society with falsehoods, uncertainty, and violence? On a more detailed note, I draw a sharp line between normal speech and selectively amplified speech. Twitter and Facebook are in a bind becaus…

Do you think we are observing a symptom (unbridled speech amplification) of the disease (monetization of algorithmically targeted content), so to speak?

Do you think that if we somehow broke this monetization model, that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google would cease to be the behemoths they are, and the amplification mechanism might go away?

Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content

#189

Post by refurb »

Barrin92 wrote: post #149
bawolff wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a counter argument to your point though? Like you're saying here that the weak weimar republic wasn't strong enough to check the extremist forces and hence that sufficient checks dont always exist.

My point is basically that I'm much more afraid of insufficient checks on radicalism and inability of society to deal with extremism than I am just with this abstract idea of tyranny. To bring it back to the topic of the US and Facebook. To me the censorship is not a sign of authoritarianism or anything, but lack of strong institutions. In the face of rising extremism and disorder Facebook effectively has to step in…

“Face of rising extremism” is just your recency bias showing and demonstrates the power of the media to shape our perceptions. There are many periods in the past where the US was experiencing far more extremism and violence than today.
Post reply on HN