The fact that they're called loopholes at all is problematic.
Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
281–290 of 340 posts
Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
#282The 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…
> 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.
The issue here is that a few monopolists have managed to capture so much of "the Internet" that competition is nearly impossible.
The current situation seems untenable: tech oligarchs deciding arbitrary rules on their own whims and for their own purposes, with no due process, on platforms that are impossible to actually compete against.
The obvious solution is breaking up the monopolies so meaningful competition is possible, and continue allowing platforms to moderate as they see fit. But tech oligarchs write big checks to politicians, and it's hard to imagine there's much appetite for biting the hand that feeds.
Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
#283Ah yes, the classic approach of renaming "rights" to "loopholes" and then eliminating them.
^ this
Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Aren’t there more ways how and more places where you can speak out today than ever before? No. There was for a little while, but the number of avenues that one has for publishing unpopular speech are at a major low vs 10 or 15 years ago. Now, the internet has reached the status quo of broadcast media prior to it: a small handful of gigantic powerful organizations have total veto over what can be published.
I'm pretty confident that, no matter what idea you want to express, you can find a forum on the Internet which allows you to express it. Even the most offensive, socially toxic ideas typically have a handful of forums that welcome them. Am I misunderstanding your argument here?
You can't find one that allows you to publish at scale. Screaming alone or in a tiny venue is very different than being able to publish to millions.
Everyone's words and ideas should be able to live or die on their own merit, and not be bottlenecked by shitty hosting and blanket domain bans in posts/DMs.
There are tons of places where you can post stuff; Facebook will happily censor DMs between consenting adults that contain your domain name when they want to share links to your content to others.
Become too unpopular (or, more accurately, increase in popularity too much with the "wrong" people) and your host will cancel your account. There aren't that many datacenter operators.
Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
#285good.gif -- drive the violent and bigoted to coalesce in the fringe.
Radicalize them further, and give them nothing to lose... I bet that will work out well.
Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Environmentally, we're entering a very dark period. The falsehoods surrounding climate change will cost us a great deal Those falsehoods comes mostly from old people watching fox news. Young people who grew up with mostly unfiltered communication on the internet are typically for doing something against climate change. So this only strengthens the point that free flow of information is more desirable than filtered…
I think the point is not that "all speech should be suppressed", but that, generally speaking, the suppression of speech should not be disallowed. Users and employees should be allowed to pressure companies to suppress hate speech; a bar owner should be allowed to kick into the street a racist and profane customer; a school should be able to fire a teacher who is getting a lot of complaints for teaching racist ideas…
> in any situation and on any public or private property, is far more destructive in my opinion.
I think this is perhaps a straw man. Nobody is asking to protect unrestricted speech in all private venues.
Would it be so bad to make it illegal for large services that have private DMs to snoop/censor those, such as we do presently for large services that have private telephone calls?
The dichotomy isn't public/private. The phone company is private and they aren't allowed to tap your phone (unless they're doing it for the government), and they're not allowed to shut off your service because you called members of the "wrong" political party too often.
Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The other challenge is DDoS protection. Any controversial site is going to attract large DDoS attacks; if the big DDoS mitigation providers drop a sites that site is either effectively dead, or pushed into the arms of a sketchy "semi state sponsored" mitigation provider like DDoS-Guard.
Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
"culture of tolerance" What does that mean exactly? By that you mean you require someone host, intolerance? Is it a "culture of tolerance" if someone spews hate on me on a social media platform because of my race, because we're tolerating that? I'm still trying to figure out what folks think this alternate choice looks like... do we require people to host whatever gets posted?
I agree with OP, opinions shouldn’t be censored, no matter how much we disagree with them. Anything that’s not harassment, a direct threat or direct call to violence should be allowed. To your example, if someone attacks you personally then that would count as harassment and be moderated out.
>opinions shouldn’t be censored
Let's say I have a platform that let's people comment, so outside of direct harassment I shouldn't be allowed to delete things?
Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands? No, they aren't, and when that time comes around they won't own up to the sophistry they spout today. Nobody has the right to leave it up to them. That is all there is to say. Don't ask the most spineless percentile, no matter how large, how to handle issues of this importance. edit: oh fuck off with your cowardly button clicking already. If you can't…
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. Regardless of how right you are or feel, it only takes discussions into hell, and we're trying to avoid that here. It's possible to make your substantive points while staying within the site guidelines, so please do that instead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The question was
> are you prepared to have these tools fall into the wrong hands?
and the topmost comment IS just sophistry, e.g. "So yes, i support having moderation." and so on. Pointing that out isn't "the flamewar style", it's anger at people being dishonest and spineless, even about an issue as important as this. You are ruining the bucket HN exists in, to protect sophistry on HN.
> Regardless of how right you are or feel
I am right, and these issues will take the WORLD to hell.
> It's possible to make your substantive points while staying within the site guidelines, so please do that instead.
Nah, I'm good. Save your own soul.
Re: Silicon Valley is shutting down speech loopholes. Latest target: live content
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically. I get the "its their service, and you agreed to the terms" but these tech corps are so big and powerful its on a scale unimaginable when these laws and ideas were originally created and its probably time to rethink how we let corporations run when they basically control the world.
It seems to me that the first step is to stop letting the tech corps control your world. If the range of opinion on popular platforms is too restricted, make a deliberate effort to step back from popular platforms onto group chats and random blogs and web forums, the same way we used to a decade ago. Most people who do this, in my experience, realize that it's actually pretty easy to see and talk about what you want…
> It seems to me that the first step is to stop letting the tech corps control your world.
This sounds like the "Read the Manual" style of programming UX, vaguely applied to the entire U.S. population.
I offer the "F" from "RTFM" as evidence that this technique doesn't scale well.
> CBS's content policies
Inside Edition cannot construct a personalized chain of increasingly engaging and outrageous conspiratorial content, on the fly, that exploits Inside Edition's data about my blind spots in order to maximally capture my attention. Personalized rabbit-holes are a problem on Youtube, however. That, the size and scope of data collected, the scope of potential content (and lack of moderation of said content), and the speed with which the blackbox algorithm can prime users are all problems which don't (currently) exist with Inside Edition. So the comparison you make isn't apt.
Edit: clarification