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

Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

necpluribusimpar.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 261 posts

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#201

Post by commandlinefan »

imgabe wrote: post #107

Instead of an ideological bias, what if it is just a demographic bias? The author supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds behind the scenes at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, picking and choosing what content is promoted. But the algorithms, at their most basic sense, promote what is popular. Based on voting records, in absolute numbers, there are simply more left-leaning people (at least in the US)…

> supposes that there are some mustache-twirling masterminds ... picking and choosing what content

Uh, no, he points out, accurately, that the mustache-twirling "masterminds" are actually kicking people off of the site for having unapproved viewpoints.

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#202

Post by repolfx »

danShumway wrote: post #115
gonational wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, the solution is simple: If any “platform” censors beyond removing illegal or copyrighted content or spam, they should have their “platform” status revoked, and they should be considered a publisher. This prevents such companies from using “platform” status as a cost saving mechanism to help them become large monopolies. Companies like Facebook would not have been able to take over so much of the market…

> It’s perfectly reasonable to want to set up some kind of publishing company that has user-generated content Note that under this setup, a forum like HN would be basically impossible to maintain. How would you set up a publishing content that included user content without having a human pre-vet all of that content? And HN has, like, 3 moderators? The practical end result of this would be that the Internet would spli…

Depends what you mean by "a forum like HN". Before HN the main geek watering hole was Slashdot, which famously never censored content and fought strongly against attempts to force it to do so.

Slashdot also had a rather sophisticated moderation and scoring system, that allowed spam (hot grits etc) to be downranked and appear auto-collapsed, whilst longer form content was upvoted and expanded by default - even if it was a reply to negative ranked content.

You may feel a personal preference for HN, or not, but they were essentially the same from the perspective of any lawyer.

In other words HN could easily keep its distinctive feel without ever banning or erasing anything, just by implementing sufficient controls that let users see what they want to see: in fact it already does via options like showdead.

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#203

Post by commandlinefan »

woopwoop wrote: post #28

Replace "censoring conservative viewpoints" with "censoring the nice people who tell me about how I can make $13,000 a week working from home". Which part of this argument changes? I can't find any part that does.

> Which part of this argument changes?

One is that people arguing about politics in political discussion forums are using the forum for its intended purpose whereas spammers are abusing it (in fact, stealing from it, since it makes its money through advertising). I’ve yet to see anybody oppose removing political discussions on forums about woodworking - that’s not what it’s for.

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#204

Post by repolfx »

klyrs wrote: post #157
jerf wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a pragmatist on this matter, I believe the solution here is scale. The control I have over a phpBB forum is that if I don't like their spam policy, I can leave, and either join another or form my own. We're not talking about a phpBB forum or a little blog with a few thousand commenters. We're talking about single companies with very significant fractions of the total discourse flowing through them. If Facebook blo…

> We're not talking about a phpBB forum or a little blog with a few thousand commenters. I listed examples including "wikis" and "social media sites" which categorically contain the largest websites in the world. You'll find websites of all orders of magnitude from tens to millions of users -- where do you draw that line? But more importantly, are you under the impression that large-scale sites are somehow immune spa…

It's easy to write laws such that totally blocking automation is allowed, totally blocking human written content is 'censorship', and categorising/hiding by default/ranking content is allowed.

Yes, this doesn't deal with things like "is YouTube ranking biased" but it's a start. You posit that sites would be obliged to publish onslaughts, but many spam filters are pretty good at filtering such attacks. For instance that's where CAPTCHAs came from (there are better technical solutions than CAPTCHAs but you get the idea).

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#205

Post by [deleted] »

d--b wrote: post #4

See but that's a libertarian issue here. If you value freedom above all else, Google being an independent entity, should have the freedom to ban / veto whomever they want. You can't have it both ways: let people be free to say whatever they want AND force the owners of communication channels to spread all information.

[deleted]

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#206

Post by commandlinefan »

root_axis wrote: post #62

Private companies should be able to censor political speech, period. If it's my desire to build a platform that is favorable to certain types of speech, that's my right and the government shouldn't be forcing me to modify my platform to rebroadcast speech I disagree with. In terms of conservative complaints about leftist censorship, I have to simply roll my eyes. The conservatives complaining about big tech don't car…

> government shouldn't be forcing me

See, here we go: he says “X is bad” and you immediately respond with “what do you mean the government should outlaw X?!” Nobody’s talking about government intervention - he actually spends a lot of time explicitly saying he isn’t.

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#207

Post by bena »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #101
giancarlostoro wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship on spam is probably agreed upon by everyone but spammers. Censorship on the opinions of people is dangerous on the other hand. Like I say on HN many times: today it's the opinions you disagree with that get censored, tomorrow it's your voice.

Isn’t that the crux of the issue? A lot of egregious hate speech — say, what Richard Spencer said in the recently leaked audio — is agreed upon by everyone but racists. But every time someone suggests censoring that, people invoke the same slippery slope fallacy. Today it’s the spam that gets censored, tomorrow it’s your voice!

Because the criteria for deciding what speech gets censored is always subjective.

Sure, we can probably find one statement that most contemporary people would agree is wrong and shouldn't be allowed to be said. Like 99.99% of contemporary people.

But what percentage do we cut it off at? 75%? 30%? And why is it a popular vote to begin with? Is morality or ethics something that is relative to popular ideas or are there some concepts that are just plain right or wrong?

I'm not afraid of people saying stupid stuff. I'm afraid of people with the power to curtail speech. Because that invariably gets used against the public.

And "the freedom to do what is right" is not really freedom. You must have the freedom to do something stupid.

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#208

Post by pornel »

mc32 wrote: post #95
jvickers wrote: post #50

I have a wide view of what 'censorship' is, and I include spam filtering in the definition. For example, a while ago I saw an advert for some kind of erection-causing pill on a forum discussing C++. If the forum moderators remove such a post, they make the forum more efficient by saving other users (who are looking for C++ content) from themselves having to filter out irrelevant information / a sales pitch. I also se…

Here’s the thing. On dedicated forums we know the protocol. We don’t want spam and we don’t want politics. If it’s a political forum we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally. So a proponent for Owls and a proponent for sawmills both get their say and one doesn’t get “deranked” or de-monetized because it’s not the popular opinion or the au currant opinion. We don’t expect one political candidate to be artif…

> we don’t want politics.

HN doesn't ban discussion about encryption, which is a political topic. HN doesn't ban discussions about non-state-approved search engines, social media, and VPNs, even though in some parts of the world they're so "political", that they get people sent to "re-education camps".

Twitter's ban on political advertising suddenly reminded everyone how many things besides wars and elections are political. You can't advertise switch to green energy now, because that's about climate change, and that's political.

In practice "politics" ban means you still allow things that are political, but only ones that are ideologically aligned with the status quo.

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#209

Post by crooked-v »

mc32 wrote: post #95
jvickers wrote: post #50

I have a wide view of what 'censorship' is, and I include spam filtering in the definition. For example, a while ago I saw an advert for some kind of erection-causing pill on a forum discussing C++. If the forum moderators remove such a post, they make the forum more efficient by saving other users (who are looking for C++ content) from themselves having to filter out irrelevant information / a sales pitch. I also se…

Here’s the thing. On dedicated forums we know the protocol. We don’t want spam and we don’t want politics. If it’s a political forum we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally. So a proponent for Owls and a proponent for sawmills both get their say and one doesn’t get “deranked” or de-monetized because it’s not the popular opinion or the au currant opinion. We don’t expect one political candidate to be artif…

> If it’s a political forum we expect all civil exchanges to be treated equally.

The problem here is that bad actors intentionally take advantage of this by supplying an endless stream of 'civil' arguments for entirely abhorrent stuff. This includes usually feigning ignorance and claiming they're 'just asking questions'† when objections are raised, even though it's the tenth or fiftieth or five hundredth time the same thing has come up.

† https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions

Re: Censorship is bad even when it’s done by private companies

#210

Post by F00bart »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #18
Miner49er wrote: post #7

So the author wants to protect "the marketplace of ideas" from monopolies caused by a different market. However, they don't want the government to do it. They also don't seem to think it's possible for smaller companies to challenge these monopolies. What then is the author's solution? One is never given.

> One is never given Here’s an obvious one: break up Facebook. Easily splits into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

You‘d need to break it into much smaller pieces, but that is the obvious solutions the problem.
Post reply on HN