Injunction issued in case about social media pressure from US Government

> You can start a site and say what you want.

Again, nobody is going to visit a website without critical mass. There is a huge cost to do this. That's why platforms should be common carriers in absence of social media being turned into a set of protocols.

> You aren't entitled to have a wide audience.

What does "entitlement" have to do with anything? You're making these arguments personal.

There's a science to virality. There's a cost to exploring state space and connecting ideas together. To matchmaking like thinkers. It's all just math.

I don't care if people choose to mute me. What I don't want is a platform muting other people on my behalf, or muting me when my messages may have an audience.

I was banned from /r/atlanta for complaining about crime on one occasion. My comment was entirely benign and apolitical, but it was against the rule of the mods to speak up about it. Now I can't post about events or ask questions. It's one of the biggest forums for my city, and I've been cut off at the knees. It's absurd. Like 1984, but we're doing it to each other.

Remember all of the censorship during Covid? Masks good -> censored, masks bad -> censored, lab leak -> censored. We lost our collective minds and started treating everyone like cattle, and that's just over one issue. This slide into darkness is going to get worse.

> If no one wants to broadcast or read what you say, too bad.

Again, your arguments are deeply personal.

One can learn how to say valuable or viral things. No one should have their finger on a trigger that can silence a voice for hundreds of viewers, let alone hundreds of millions. We're giving a few people the ability to un-person others. Technology is so central to our existence now that we need to revisit the first amendment to square up our rights and make sure they're still being respected.

> Read what I wrote again and pay closer attention, I don't care what you do, the question is if you care about the censorship on the site you are posting on now.

I don't like the censorship on HN. I don't like censorship anywhere.

We don't need to brainwash people into agreeing with us or hellban those we disagree with.

Signal to noise ratio is an engineering problem.

Do you have any remaining questions about my position? It should be pretty clear.

> I never said that, I asked why you were using a heavily censored site while being against censorship.

""If you don't like America, then leave.""

This is a perfectly salient analogy.

I will not leave because you don't like my opinion.

I will not leave because you may or may not want me to go.

I will not leave because this isn't my ideal communication platform.

There are lots of ways in which the world and technology could be better. I'll make do with what I have, and I'll strive for something better.

> You can look at voat, slashdot, zero hedge and 4chan knockoffs, and there is tons of nazi spam along with other terrible stuff that people don't want to read and sites don't want to broadcast.

Anecdotal.

Turning social media in a protocol would give everyone the lever to control their own intake. If that were built, you needn't worry about stuff you "don't want to read".

You shouldn't ever concern yourself with other people's business or determining what they should or shouldn't read. That's authoritarian.

> You can go make your own site but you aren't entitled to an audience.

I know I'm taking some liberty here, but this reads as, "leave me alone and go do [impossible thing]. You don't deserve to be heard and nobody wants to listen to you."

There's an audience for just about anything. The platforms we have today are suboptimal means of connecting interest graphs together. They have other people and objective criteria meddling in the middle.

I see your argument as potentially being one of desiring power over others. To control what one side can read or say. Have you ever wondered what would happen if the power dynamics reversed? Because that's one of my chief concerns. Free speech is so important that anyone should have access regardless of the institutions in power. Institutions that are fickle and subject to change.

Would you give me the ability to unilaterally censor or choose what you consume? Would you trust anyone other than yourself?

You shouldn't control what liberals or conservatives can see. Neither party should have control over the other. Everyone should be left alone.

The ideal stack would be pure p2p communication. Nobody sticking their nose in anyone else's business.

> You didn't actually make an argument and you didn't back anything up with evidence at all. You just said you wanted big sites to not have any moderation.

Let me clarify: websites with over 100M DAU should be public squares. We can't possibly agree on the right level of censorship to apply or which subjects are forbidden. Any influence thus exerted is a relative form of positional brainwashing and silencing. You cannot possibly get it right.

Illegal content can be removed - that's a pretty well defined line.

NSFW content can be tagged and users can (probably by default) filter it out. I'm even fine when platforms prohibit this outright, though you can easily get into debates about classification - "female presenting nipples" and other minutiae.

Political or controversial content can be annotated and filtered at the discretion of end users. This is where technology can and should be leveraged. The platform moderators should have no say.

Direct harassment can be muted. Every platform has a "mute" button and a "block user" button. A p2p platform could make these block lists shareable (another reason why p2p social media would be fantastic).

Any entity you distrust is also an entity that most reasonably fits into the classification of dislike.

You may like thier products or services but that's not the same as liking the corp itself.

Maybe we're talking past each other - the government did not commandeer or nationalize these companies as part of its emergency declaration, and so the government's ability to direct actions at an organization in those circumstances is not what the issue is about.

The issue (and apparently we may agree on this(?)) is where the line is for the government to compel action in a private organization short of officially commandeering it. This will inevitably lead us to debating how "voluntary" the actions of a company are when law enforcement is asking it "nicely", and how nicely they were really asking for that cooperation.

You seem to be framing this as an interest balancing test. The courts may see it that way. It doesn't seem like the whole story to me though, principally because none of the actions on the part of the government were done through regulatory policy or legislation, but through "conversation", side-channel influence, etc. To me, that's fundamental to this discussion. Interest balancing would make sense if we were debating the legality of regulation saying the government can direct Internet platforms to hide the non-criminal commentary of users that is not in alignment with the official government position. Instead, we're talking about actions of law-enforcement and their NGOs influencing organizations outside of any official regulatory commission to do so. It's hard to see the public accepting regulatory policy that allowed this. It's hard for me to see how this behavior of the federal government is allowable when nobody wants to make it official policy.

Now, my biases having interacted with the FBI on behalf of organizations in past lives, I think all interaction with them is highly delicate, and never blind to potential consequences of getting on their bad side. Consider the background of this particular injunction - most of these substantial conversations with law enforcement personnel will be off the record (over coffee), broad statements are being made about criminal liability from public figures in the press. Is it possible for a multibillion-dollar American company to not feel any pressure to "cooperate"? If there's pressure, it's coercive. It may or may not be effective, it may or may not be the deciding factor. But there's also the scale - do we believe all these companies happened to voluntarily go along with the government program of censorship out of friendly cooperation sans subtext of ending up on the "wrong" side of the Justice dept?

I think all of us we need to be considering if that's how we want our federal law enforcement to operate. Again, if the gov. feels it has the political capital to commandeer companies in an emergency, go for it. Do it above the board and let the political consequences (if any) work themselves out. Or if it feels it has the support for censorship as a regulatory matter, try it. Just be up front about it. Yes, the specific method certainly is at issue here.

Well, it protects some. It makes the Biden administration somewhat less likely to ask, because there's a public rebuke from the courts, and if they keep doing it anyway, they are likely to lose any further court cases around it. So they have some deterrent - not perfect, but more than zero.

From the company's side, they have some indication that they are likely to be backed by the courts if it comes to that, so they have some more confidence in telling the administration to get lost - not perfect, but more than none. (They're not going to be less willing to say no after this court ruling.)

So, yes, the Biden administration could keep going. But that's unlikely to play well, either in the courts or in the press. The Biden administration is not a dictatorial regime; they face an election in 14 months. That gives them more incentive to "control the narrative", true, but it also gives them incentive to not be visibly seen as bullying the social media.

>Book bans, the "Don't say gay" law

These are limited to the government itself. The "don't say gay," bill makes it illegal for teachers to teach sexual related stuff to elementary school kids. It's a form of self-governing (no pun intended) and isn't restricting the rights of citizens, which the first amendment protects. It's restricting what the government itself can do. Book bans are also limited to what the school library may carry and doesn't apply to public libraries or book stores and the like.

>requiring medical professionals to spout specific claims about the "harms" of pregnancy termination and a raft of other stuff too.

This is technically compelled speech rather than censorship. It's another concept I'm not overly comfortable with. To be fair, it's compelling a licensed physician to do this when performing his or her profession, which the government (and the people) has chosen to regulate. A physician wouldn't be compelled to do this outside his or her practicing medicine.