This website is garbage. Look at their other articles. They’re not supporting free speech, they’re pissed they and their ilk can’t peddle lies as easily anymore.
Why not criticise the article, rather than the website?
Corporate Unpersoning
21–30 of 49 posts
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#22I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones. In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).
There are plenty of options in the modern era to promulgate your views without the support of any company. You can host them on ipfs, print them out and paste them as flyers, etc. Companies do not owe it to you to let you promote your views using their infrastructure. Maybe it is in their best interest, or the best interest of their users, or maybe not. But historically, we have valued companies' (and, transitively,…
Not so sure about that - at least in Europe legislators are taking a pretty good look at the concentration of power in the tech giants. I think it's easy to be relaxed about this when the corporations are apparently aligned with your political interests, but would you still be arguing for a light touch if the opposite were true?
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#23This website is garbage. Look at their other articles. They’re not supporting free speech, they’re pissed they and their ilk can’t peddle lies as easily anymore.
Found on the masthead:
> IMPORTANT NOTE: We do NOT accept paid advertising
Yeah, it's like alien territory over there.
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#24I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones. In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).
I don’t think we want to be in the business of forcing companies and people to publish or promote speech that they disagree with for whatever reason.
We already force companies and people to take actions that may not be compatible with their beliefs - for example here in the UK it's illegal to refuse to rent to a homosexual couple on the basis of their sexuality a room in a bed and breakfast, despite the fact that some proprietors feel this infringes on their religious beliefs.
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of options in the modern era to promulgate your views without the support of any company. You can host them on ipfs, print them out and paste them as flyers, etc. Companies do not owe it to you to let you promote your views using their infrastructure. Maybe it is in their best interest, or the best interest of their users, or maybe not. But historically, we have valued companies' (and, transitively,…
Not so sure about that - at least in Europe legislators are taking a pretty good look at the concentration of power in the tech giants. I think it's easy to be relaxed about this when the corporations are apparently aligned with your political interests, but would you still be arguing for a light touch if the opposite were true?
I would definitely be less comfortable if corporations were generally taking pro-hate or anti-factual stances. But since they're generally taking anti-hate or pro-factual viewpoints, I'm good with it. I think this is one of those cases where it's very hard to separate "my political views" and my epistemic or ethical views. To the extent that the latter two are part of my politics, you could say that they are political views, but I think there is more to it than that.
There are other political views I oppose where I would want corporations to allow those views to be expressed on their platforms. For example, I'm opposed to a lot of economic conservativism. But I don't see it as being anti-epistemic, and I don't think corporations should suppress those viewpoints. Fortunately, that's not what is happening. I would be shocked if anyone had ever been banned from Twitter, Facebook, or Google News for promoting these sorts of views.
So the problem here is that all views are political in a sense, but views are not merely political. It's not rightist political views generally that are being suppressed. It is other, more specific types of views that tend, at this point in time, to be associated with the right.
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#26This website is garbage. Look at their other articles. They’re not supporting free speech, they’re pissed they and their ilk can’t peddle lies as easily anymore.
What an interesting definition of "free speech" you hint at here. Tell us more!
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#27This website is garbage. Look at their other articles. They’re not supporting free speech, they’re pissed they and their ilk can’t peddle lies as easily anymore.
Agreed. Read UNZ.com to catch up on the latest thought in antisemitic, eugenicist, racist, and elitist circles. Otherwise, don't get upset when dehumanizers get unpersoned.
The thing I like about Unz.com is that it doesn't seem particularly to favor one side over the other; marginalized voices of all stripes are welcome, would-be neo-Hitlers and would-be neo-Stalins alike.
To be sure, I don't have a lot of use for opinions of either stripe, but I'm glad that there's a place left on the Internet where both are suffered to exist in public, for a little while longer at least. Sticking your head under a pillow and your fingers in your ears doesn't make them go away, and all else equal, you're safer being able to keep an eye on them.
(Incidentally, the comment to which I'm responding is posted under a name that's 53 days old, with 1 karma, no submissions, 1 comment. It's almost as though someone made this account a while back so the green name would age off and then stuck it in a back pocket for eventual sockpuppeting use, but I'm sure that is merely an unworthy cavil...)
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#28I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones. In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).
OK. So ... I startup in my garage. And, somehow, I build a platform that people congregate together to use to talk to each other.
Then... you think that the government should compel me to allow any and all voices to use my private property as a megaphone?
I guess that is no different from making Christian bakers attend in support of a gay wedding or forcing Catholic nuns to fund birth-control - so ... crack on.
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#29I'm starting to wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections in a private context the way that it has anti-discrimination ones. In the digital age, "in public" is often part of a digital forum run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, fark, etc.).
>wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections [...] run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, This really isn't possible to implement in any practical or consistent way without contradictions in usability. If you made such a law, trolls such as Nazi-proponents would use it as a weapon to infect sites such as HackerNews with their walls of hate speech. Moderators couldn't flag nor de…
> The reason free speech advocates don't like that option is that they don't get an audience
I don't like it because "public areas" are owned and governed by private entities. It's nonsense to say you're in public if there's no public listening. That's not free speech, it's free speech zones. As in, "Say whatever you want, just say it to yourself in that shed over there."
> Nazi-proponents would use it as a weapon to infect...
I think Nazis are dispicable but quantitatively not a big enough problem to be worth the cost of genuine public discussion and debate. A group idiots the size of Raton, New Mexico running around in tiki torches in Charlottesville is sensational, but not really our biggest issue, even if we limit the discussion to racism and hatred.
If trolls show up on message boards, the solution is curation, moderation, law enforcement (digital assault should be enforced more), and good counterarguments.
Right now, people are worried about totalitarian government and corporate police punishing them for thought crime. If you asked me a decade ago, I would have called that paranoid, but these days the supporting examples and surveys seem to be piling up.
Re: Corporate Unpersoning
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
>wonder if America needs to add basic but explicit free speech protections [...] run by a private entity (twitter, facebook, HN, This really isn't possible to implement in any practical or consistent way without contradictions in usability. If you made such a law, trolls such as Nazi-proponents would use it as a weapon to infect sites such as HackerNews with their walls of hate speech. Moderators couldn't flag nor de…
> The reason free speech advocates don't like that option is that they don't get an audience I don't like it because "public areas" are owned and governed by private entities. It's nonsense to say you're in public if there's no public listening. That's not free speech, it's free speech zones . As in, "Say whatever you want, just say it to yourself in that shed over there." > Nazi-proponents would use it as a weapon t…
>If trolls show up on message boards, the solution is curation, moderation
And those editorial mechanisms mean you no longer have "freedom of speech" -- which breaks the very law you're proposing. That's what I meant by "contradictions" in my previous message. A new law that extends "freedom of speech to private entities" is not possible for society to implement in a consistent manner.
>Right now, people are worried about totalitarian government and corporate police punishing them for thought crime.
Well, maybe we're having 2 different conversations. I'm not talking about situations like China and their Great Firewall suppressing Tiananmen Square, Taiwan independence, and other topics of dissent. That's the _government_ doing the censorship and not _private_ website like HN censoring by deleting posts. That's a different topic from "extending freedom of speech to private entities" that you were talking about.
Instead, I'm talking about websites with unpopular topics like Unz.com which spawned this thread and neo-Nazi website like Dailystormer.ws. If DailyStormer can reject articles about "programming in Lisp", HackerNews should likewise be able to reject posts about "eliminating the Jewish population".
Trying to craft the wording on a new law such that both sides like HN and DailyStormer can post off-topic content on each others' website without censorship is a futile goal for lawmakers.
Right now, in the USA, American citizens can go point their browser url to Dailystormer.ws and read all the articles. There is no Great American Firewall nor ISP blocking access.