Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'
wsj.comAre we really so stupid that we cannot see through this kind of thing and need to actively censor it to have civilized society continue to function?
When do we just give up on democracy completely?
For historical context, it may be worth noting that the framers of the US constitution did not envision having direct popular election of the President [1], nor of senators [2].
To be clear, I'm not indicating that the framers had the right idea about this. Rather, just mentioning that the risks of under-informed general populace exercising direct democratic election has been under consideration since the nation's founding.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
Not just that. They were basically counting on a farely elite electorate being established in most states. Universal Manhood Suffrage wasn't even really an issue in the American revolution the way it was in the French Rev.
Even through the progressive era when some of these things changed, parties were more powerful and they definitely filtered popular intent. And that way more than today. We didn't have small 'd' democratic presidential primaries until the 70s and this last one was the first for the Democrats.
To be fair, the founders established the federal government to be a government for/of the states. It was established to manage and negotiate the affairs and disputes between the states (like the EU today). Each state was it's own sovereign "country" and upon ratifying the Constitution voluntarily gave up limited sovereignty to the federal government. There's a whole ton more to unpack here and yes, the original folks allowed suffrage (at the federal and individual state levels) were the "nobles" (landowners) who from what I know and can ascertain where almost exclusively white men.
I don't really understand how that is relevant to the OP's question about censorship. Did the framers also think that censoring the views of the POTUS would be required?
EDIT: Although going along with your point, I also remember the framers wanting the electors to be determined at the local level (district) rather than state. That would change things significantly, IMO.
The question was "are we really so stupid that..." The answer, at least according to the Framers, as implied by their actions, is "yes."
The sibling comments already stated this well, but yes you're correct that I didn't directly address the censorship angle. However I believe that becomes moot in the system originally designed by the framers.
As per Hamilton and Madison in my first link above, the original intention was to have members of the electoral college be unbiased, well-respected, well-educated citizens who each independently voted for whichever candidate they thought would be the best president. Only the members of the electoral college directly voted for a specific presidential candidate. On a local level, the presidential election consists of electing members of the electoral college, who each were not originally envisioned to be pledged to one specific presidential candidate.
This system quickly proved to be overly idealistic, with respect to the fast rise of political parties in the US. Anyway, my original point was simply that an under-informed voting public was always a major concern in American democracy, rather than a new or modern concern.
Indirect selection of the executive reduces the populist power of the President. They have to win votes of party members, not the public at large.
I completely agree. I would like to see some of the other replies here comment on how democracy can function if the citizens are incompetent/stupid. If they can't be trusted to be knowledgeable, then how can they make informed decisions, including voting? And of course, who decides which people hold legitimate positions and which people are ignorant?
It is well known that an educated, free people are necessary for the functioning of democracy. It's part of the justification for the 1st Amendment.
We have new technologies which are being leveraged to intentionally misinform people, in a society that has degraded public education and raised the cost of higher education to levels prohibitive for the majority of the population, and as a result, the society (as a whole) is no longer sufficiently informed.
So, how can democracy function if the citizens are not educated? It can't. We are now seeing the results of the effects mentioned above, and the tech companies in question are starting to realize it, and respond in only way they can, while still maintaining their own wealth and power.
Prior to 1950, the median adult American did not have a high school education.[1] If your thesis is that modern-day Americans are too uneducated for democracy, then you'd have to conclude the same about nearly any point in our history. (Or any other democracy prior to a couple decades ago.)
Actually, my thesis isn't that Americans are too uneducated for democracy. It's that they are being manipulated by modern technology, which education in the US has failed to keep up with, resulting in the age of misinformation and "fake news."
We live in a new era, the most stark difference being mass communication accessibility. This helps smart people become smarter, but it also helps smart people manipulate uneducated people.
My personal thesis on the issues the US is facing involves far more than the systemic defunding of education, but also on economic issues, like how our monetary system has exported labor, leading to a larger class divide and the polarization we're seeing, as well as social media companies (and news companies) having an incentive to promote inflammatory content to generate ad revenue.
Your point makes sense but it's not because of lack of education. Education won't change the natural distribution of intellect and education is often a form of indoctrination as well.
The entire history of civilization is a few cold blooded psychopaths manipulating gullible people into doing whatever is needed.
And if you think one side is better than the other you're on the receiving end too.
The primary thing I disagree with here is the thought that we can squelch our way to a more informed public. You clearly believe you can discern truth from lies, as do I. So why should the solution to misinformation be to trust a small group (who we didn't elect) to parse truth from fiction? I'd rather have access to all the information, and be better at discernment. And I reject the idea that we represent a minority of the United States. I think most people are way better at detecting lies than we give them credit for. The problem is, both sides lie. So it's too easy for us to view those who hold opposing views as ignorant fools, because they are on the side of a lie, regardless of if they believe that falsehood or not.
Prior to 1950 (and later), the US wasn't a democracy in the modern sense (as the ability of many citizens to vote was restricted either de jure or de facto), and there were plenty of organizations who were appealing to the uneducated fears of the American populace to keep it that way. Some of them even used mob violence and myths about a past era of greatness.
So, yes.
The US is one of the most educated countries in the world! Only Korea and Canada are materially ahead of us in college attainment: https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/with...
We’re way ahead of Germany or Italy.
The America that sent a man to the moon had around 5% of people with a college degree.
Overeducation may itself be a problem:
Elite overproduction, and especially overproduction of the youth with advanced degrees, continues unabated. Our institutions of higher education have been churning out law, MBA, and PhD degrees, many more than could be absorbed by the economy. In a Bloomberg View article published just a few days ago Noah Smith provides the numbers for the overproduction of PhDs (America Is Pumping Out Too Many Ph.D.s https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-04/americ...).
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-storming-of-the-u-s...
Sure, but as someone not from the US it looks like that education ain't worth much in the US as you deliberately undermine peoples ability to learn critical thinking by teaching creationism in schools.
This is a really funny accusation since:
1) We don’t teach any religion in schools.
2) Many highly advanced EU countries are required to teach religion in schools e.g. many German states: https://eftre.weebly.com/deutschland-germany.html
I didn't accuse the US of teaching religion, I accused it of teaching creationism and undermining peoples ability to learn critical thinking.
I know that religion is taught in the EU, I went to school in Denmark. And no one pushed it as reality, it was more of a learn this fiction because it has historically been important and some people still believe it. Not once was it presented as reality or something we should believe in.
> I didn't accuse the US of teaching religion, I accused it of teaching creationism and undermining peoples ability to learn critical thinking.
We don't, and we legally cannot.
> I know that religion is taught in the EU, I went to school in Denmark. And no one pushed it as reality, it was more of a learn this fiction because it has historically been important and some people still believe it. Not once was it presented as reality or something we should believe in.
That is more than is legally permissible in the U.S. And even if people don't perceive the education as saying "this is true" it still socializes kids in a shared religious history and helps them understand the people who still believe it. There is nothing comparable to this in the U.S.
You're right that religion isn't taught in US schools, however, it is promoted when schools and states work as hard as they can to exclude evolution from public school curriculums. This is effectively teaching the population religion in areas where religion is common and evolution is purged from the school books.
Serious question: can you show evidence where this has actually taken place in the school curriculum in recent times?
Anybody can advocate for anything, from wanting to teach Satanism and anti-vaxx science to GMOs cause cancer and "New Math", but the curriculum doesn't bend so easily since there are federal standards. Beyond fear mongering and "leftist memes", any real examples?
In the late 1990s/early 2000s some folks got textbooks to put stickers saying “evolution is just a theory.”
All this comment demonstrates is that some bizarre narratives about the U.S. have taken hold. I went to a public high school in rural Missouri. We weren't taught creationism, for crying out loud. In fact, it would have been illegal for them to do so.
This is not a very meaningful measure, given that the standards of a "college education" today are way lower than even a high-school education in e.g. the 19th century. Anti-intellectualism is not a new development or a result of the Internet; it has been somewhat common for quite some time, even among the self-proclaimed intellectual elite.
People are more educated than ever. They are more literate and more have attended at least some college. They also have more access to information than ever before. Either lack of education isn't the problem or it's an impossible standard.
I agree that people are more educated than ever. And more literate. And more college educated. However, they are not more educated on the topics related to the context of this discussion, like how to filter what's seen on social media, or how the government actually works, or economic systems, or most of the things political discussions are made from. Those topics aren't taught effectively in school anymore, at least not in the areas correlated with alt-right extremism.
Looks like we commented at the same time.
Are we even allowed to have political discussions at school? It seems like it isn't allowed in primary and secondary schools.
Even at the college level it seems that minority opinion holders are basically shamed into being quiet or are dismissed as unintelligent when it comes to the biggest issues.
I think it could also be the type of information being taught. If people aren't learning about biases, fallacies, basic logic, etc, then it can be easy for people to fall victim to false information. In that sort of scenario, more access to information could be more dangerous.
> raised the cost of higher education to levels prohibitive for the majority of the population
Do you think there was a time when the majority of the population were college educated? Or realistically had access to college education?
1945--1985 was arguably the high point. G.I. Bill and a rapid expansion of public university systems (inspired by the Sputnik scare --- see California's Master Plan by Clark Kerr), along with low or no tuitions. The tide began turning in the mid-to-late 1980s with rising tuition and a greatly increased reliance on loans.
Do you have some charts or data on degrees conferred per year as a percent of the population?
Also, it looks like percent of the population with a degree is higher now than ever.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...
US BLS, Census, ad NCES have comprehensive stats, with summaries at Wikipedia,[1] and whilst in overall numbers you're probably correct, there are some counterarguments.
- Through the 1960s and possibly early 1970s, a solidly middle-class lifestyle remained possible without a college education. Apprentice and vocational tracks were abundant and viable.
- US Census data show a Bachellors-level local maximum attainment of about 25% in 1977, not exceeded until the mid-1990s.
- Many (though not all) who wanted a degree could get one. Money certainly wasn't the barrier. Yes, it helped (a lot) to be white and male, but former income and class barriers had fallen. By the 1960s, most undergrad programmes were fully co-ed, by the 1970s, graduate and professional. By the 1980s, both were female-majority in many schools if not outright overall.
- Debt loads on graduation were effectively nil at public schools. It was possible to study, work part-time, and save a little. On graduation, options were far more open for exploration, public service, volunteering ... or hedonism. This was a high point for Peace Corps work.
- Grad school was opening up tremendously.
- Academic positions for those grad students were numerous, in large part due to the rapid campus expansion.
Today's colleges deliver more graduates, both absolutely and as a fraction of population.
But as with automobiles and smartphones, what was once an optional luxury has become a necessity: many basic jobs request (though not all require) a degree. Debt loads are crushing. Secondary education quality is widely perceived as lower, and graduation rates there are effectively unchanged from the 1950s (whites) or early 1970s (all). What variation does exist largely trades graduation rates for aptitude levels.
There have always been some graduates who wind up in jobs that don’t require a college degree. But the share seems to be growing. In 1970, only 1 in 100 taxi drivers and chauffeurs in the U.S. had a college degree, according to an analysis of labor statistics by Ohio University’s Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart and Jonathan Robe. Today [2013], 15 of 100 do.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-25/why-are-so-many-col...
So ... yeah, today more people get a college degree, because they must, with possibly worse quality, far higher direct cost, and more constrained options.
Is this really progress?
I'd explored dimensions of this topic a few years ago, output here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=education&rest...
________________________________
Notes:
1. Try NCES: https://nces.ed.gov
Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
Plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
But how is this a response to the comment below in the context of voters being educated and your initial response being that the peak was the peak was 1945-1985?
"Do you think there was a time when the majority of the population were college educated? Or realistically had access to college education?"
It seems overall the education of the population has risen, although it might not be as high quality. Also, this lower quality can lend itself to higher attainment (eg college entrance exams being more lax). Also, 1945-85 you would have higher number of people who never went to high school because 8th grade was considered sufficient when they were a child. So just through demographic change (sadly, those older people dying off) and an increase in the job market's demand for higher credentials we can see the level of education has risen over time, resulting in the most educated populace we've seen.
And overeducation may itself be a problem:
Elite overproduction, and especially overproduction of the youth with advanced degrees, continues unabated. Our institutions of higher education have been churning out law, MBA, and PhD degrees, many more than could be absorbed by the economy. In a Bloomberg View article published just a few days ago Noah Smith provides the numbers for the overproduction of PhDs (America Is Pumping Out Too Many Ph.D.s https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-04/americ...).
http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-storming-of-the-u-s...
Addressing points, reframing as questions (trying to preserve your meaning), sequencing by specificity and nonambiguity:
Q: Was a time when the majority of the population were college educated?
A: With the absolute peak being both now below 50%, as a strict mathematical statement: No.
Q: When did realistic access to college education peak?
A: The confluence of factors in the 1960--1985 period ... arguably approaches this. Access was not gated by cost, gender, geography, or within a fair approximation, race, but by aptitude and interest. Not perfectly, but better than at any period before or since. The 1977 local maximum (as percent of population) supports this. Present access seems more push-based (obligation/necessity) than pull-based (interest, aptitude), compared to 1960--1980, by rough sense. The BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement) to "attend college" was far more appealing then as to now. How to measure this? Hard to say, though the "college premium" or noncollege average or, say, 10%ile annual income, might be proxies.
Q: In the years 1945-85 you would have higher number of people who never went to high school?
A: That's shifting the question from (as I interpreted it) "when the majority of normatively college-aged persons (say, 16--29) had access to bachellors-level education", to "when the majority of voting-eligible residents had a 4-year college degree". The 2nd is a restatement of the first question above, the answer is still "no".
Either way, if you want to translate peak educational achievement to total voting population, you'd have to shift numbers foreward by life expectancy. Say, by 65 years assuming educational completion by age 25 on average. So the US are presently bounded by the 1955 educational cohort, with both secondary and postsecondary attainment growing for the next 22 years to the 1977 maxima. Net of immigration's effect on numbers. By that argument, voter education levels will probably increase for another two decades, though college-level degrees will remain a minority.
This also highlights an issue with the data we're discussing, which measures total poulation educational attainment, and not education-aged attainment. That is, 80% population high-school graduation implies a higher graduation (or GED) rate by, say, age 19. So we're on the hunt for data actually answering our question. NCES does give diplomas conferred somewhere, these can be compared to cohort population with some finagling.
Understanding questions, data, and baselines is critical.
See, e.g., https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/educatio...
You might like this plot: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2017/comm/amer...
Public High School Graduation Rates (Last Updated: May 2020) https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_coi.asp
Gives Adjusted cohort graduation (ACGR), the term you probably want. The racial divides are ... sobering. And not necessarily as expected.)
Q: Is education received as high-quality?
A: This is the tough one. Quality here needs to be considered as "fitness to purpose", and ... well, purpose has changed. There's also the credentialing role of education, and the more credentials you hand out, the less distinguishing they are, though by inversion, the more arbitrary earlier credentials may have been. High school graduation rates in the US in 1900 were, I forget if it was 6% or 10%, but low. Overwhelmingly male and white, so among that cohort, closer to 25%. (Much attainment gain has come from increased access, across numerous domains, not just education.) Curriculum and consequence were much nearer a two-year, or higher, college education, as were certification and networking benefits.
NCES does some measures, including very infrequent, but fascinating, National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), with assessments in 1985 (NAEP), 1992 (NALS), and 2003, covering prose, document, and quantitative literacy. The 2003 survey sampled 19,000 resident adults.
There's a psychology of cognitive development, notably Jean Piaget's (1896--1980) work on stages and level of development, which posits fairly persistent population limits on attainment levels, though I'm only very lightly familiar with the field and current state of knowledge.
Recent studies of computer literacy, however, tend to strongly corroborate Piaget's notions of general atrainment level, notably a 2016 OECD study of computer skills across 215,942 people in 33 countries. If you're in the infotech sector, the findings are sobering. Jacob Nielsen has an excellent write-up, and the study a keystone of my own "Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User" essay.
The upshot is that the needle may only be capable of being pushed so far, and diminishing returns set in early. Increasing access and support at the lowest levels should have vastly greater returns than attempting to raise the highest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piaget%27s_theory_of_cognitive...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258051-en
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
Direct measures of knowledge and intelligence prove complex.
Q: Does this result in the most educated populace the US has ever seen?
A: Again, by a confluence of measures, I'm not comfortable drawing this conclusion. Fundamentally it confounds inputs (years of schooling), arbitrary indicia (diplomas conferred), and results (population intellectual capacity). It ignores not only shifting academic baselines (curricula, degre requirements, major course of study mix), as discussed, but other factors significant in a political context. A key one being the creation of a small number of tech or other highly-skilled professional hubs, which geographically concentrate educated populations. Given the electoral colleges effective "land vote" (two senate seats per state, regardless of population), education is systemically underrepresented in Presidential, Senate, and (similarly) statehouse politics (both states collectively and internally). This itself considerable dampens effects of education in muany political races and issues.
There's also the fact that educational attainment does not itself seem to preclude leadership in fascist politics, witness those in leadership positions of such movements around the world. A factor which somewhat un-asks the initial question. Mu.
On a number of grounds, I really don't see education by itself as a saviour, thogh it does play some role. More modest than many seem to advocate or hope.
A bit long and wandering somewhat from your specific question, I apologise. Hopefully useful.
This was considered and known by the framers of the Constitution.
House of Representatives was designed to allow for direct election and therefore allow for the “stupid” (as you call it) common man to influence government. Most of the other branches (e.g. judicial, executive, and the Senate) were appointed by the supposedly “non-stupid” members of legislatures and judicial boards.
The answer to the last question is no one should decide who is ignorant, as the thought of having someone decide this is well ... ignorant.
I just had a stupid run in with a trooper and magistrate.
Due process? Nah, never heard of it. Dismiss with prejudice? I'm not prejudice! (Magistrates in my state don't even have to be lawyers)
My god, no wonder there are people who want to actually abolish the police. Gave me a lot of perspective. I contacted a civil rights lawyer and he said I have a case, but that judges don't want to be bothered with it unless it involves significant financial damages. Says a lot about how much the system values our rights.
I agree that democracy can't function properly if citizens are stupid. All these talks of censorship are merely a stopgap measure, whether you're for or against it. The proper long-term fix is better public education.
Coincidentally, there are a certain group of people opposed to public education, ahem, I mean, "indoctrination" - they will continue to be a problem, but hopefully smaller and smaller problem if we have better education.
I agree, it can't function. I don't see another solution except:
1. Vastly improved education
2. Smaller governed regions (break up countries more).
I think the first is a given, but the second is because (big surprise) most people don't care to meet the needs of absolutely everyone because it's completely impractical and likely impossible.
Difference of opinion is why countries were formed. I'm amazed borders haven't changed more.
Well that's why democracy wasn't the aim of the Constitution. Voters were allowed to pick the one guy in their town who would make decisions for them, and that's it. Idiots have ruined the system that they created for us, and there's no going back.
Democracy can function if they are incompetent and stupid. It won't function optimally, it may not function well, but it will function, even if to absurd ends.
Democracy doesn't need to make people richer, healthier, or safer to function. Oklahoma's population is anti education and this is reflected in their government. Will that damage their children for the future? Likely. But democracy continues to function in Oklahoma anyway.
It cannot function if the losers turn violent and attack the government. At this point, "stop the steal" is almost a rallying cry for militant action as every other possible remedy has been exhausted. That is what makes it distinct.
Oklahoma outperforms California in grade 8 science and tied in grade 8 math: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?chor...
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
Don't give up on democracy. It is hard. Nonetheless, it will always remain the best form of government we have seen. The United States Constitution is resilient as it has proven time and time again.
At this point "stop the steal" is essentially a rallying cry for militant action. Civilized society rapidly stops functioning if that action comes to fruition.
You'd have a valid point here if all people were 100% rational actors with perfect knowledge and agency. Unfortunately, they aren't.
> Unfortunately, they aren't.
Yet they are allowed to drive cars, fly planes, raise children, buy guns and vote but somehow cannot decide for themselves what’s good or bad, and need a higher moral entity like Facebook to babysit them. I find this a weak argument.
Beside voting and children, most of the time people need a permit/license to show that they are fit to do the things you mention.
I don't know what a way to show that you are a rational, well informed, mentally fit citizen able to responsibly vote without falling for basic fakes news and misinformation attacks would be.
At least denial of reality should raise serious questions. How can we expect a flat earther, 6000year-old-world believer, climate change and holocaust denier to rationally chose who to put at the helm of a country?
Politics should be about people disagreeing on the means to address a set of common challenges, not about those who imagine living in another world so far removed from ours that they can't have a valuable opinion.
Facebook is under no obligation to assist in planning and organizing an attempted mass killing event. Neither are you or I, which is how it should stay.
Many seem to have been completely taken in to it, yes. And given it seems to have lead to deadly consequences already, I don't think it's unreasonable for these companies to consider it a huge liability.
Are you aware of what other things have led to deadly consequences? Communism, socialism, green terrorism, and self driving cars come to mind.
Totally, and then you have unfettered capitalism and corporatism, kakistocracies, oligarchies and lawn darts. Unfortunately, unlike all of those things, the FBI, Homeland Security[1] and Congress [2] actually found that white supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States.
So, when social networks' legal/liability or moderation teams take action on the precise content that was used to foment a coup, it's not terribly shocking from a legal perspective.
1: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/04/white-supremacists-...
2: https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s894/BILLS-116s894is.xml
StopTheSteal is not a slogan of white supremacists. In fact, it has nothing to do with white supremacism. Are you saying that 60 million or so people in the US are white supremacists?
That's not a very generous interpretation of what I said.
That’s how many people think there was funny business in this election, IIRC, so what exactly are you saying if it isn’t that 60M people are extremists who need to have their voices silenced?
The number of people repeating misinformation isn't really relevant. You really seem to leverage many various fallacies, like slippery slope and argument from incredulity. My exact statement was, in context to the facts about white supremacy and far right extremists, both groups having a well documented presence at the attempted coup, that when social networks' legal/liability or moderation teams take action on the precise content that was used to foment a coup, it's not terribly shocking from a legal perspective. You seem to be shocked though, why is that?
Where is this 60 million number coming from?
This is simply whataboutism.
No it’s not. The post I’m responding to made a case for why censorship is fine in this case. That reason applies very very broadly.
If we are ok with that reason, then we are ok with that reason, and we must acknowledge what else is caught in that net.
> If we are ok with that reason, then we are ok with that reason, ...
This is a slippery-slope fallacy. Facebook removing content containing speech directly associated with highly illegal activity doesn't mean the country is becoming socialist.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I never said it was becoming socialist. I gave a simple warning that the reason is enough to silence vast swaths of public discourse.
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-great-coup-of-2021
>Once power loses its mask, once censoring dissent because it makes a mockery of the government is not just what power is doing, but actually what power says it’s doing, we enter a new stage of history—because serving this power is openly humiliating to the servant. Or at least, to any servant of intelligence, wisdom, conscience and character.
>At this stage, therefore, power is actively recruiting its own counter-elite. There is only one way to produce a regime change that sticks: a circulation of the elites. Therefore, we have taken a genuine step toward history. The gigantic gear has moved one click.
You are underestimating the power of misinformation.
After 60+ court cases challenging the election fail, and half the population still believe it's stolen, we're completely beyond the realm of misinformation (though there's plenty of that still going on). One side simply wants to seize power and is leveraging the tools at its disposal to do so.
I'm very interested in whether the republican party splits away from it's base - or the moderates leave altogether. One can claim that it's a small portion of the republican party which supported the insurrection - but for the last 10 years that portion has pushed the rest of the party to vote their way.
The split may come from Pence, interestingly enough. It didn't take much for Trump to malign his VP two weeks from the end of his term. Pence was chosen to satisfy the evangelicals, who are another similar group to the MAGAs in that they're not the mainstream republicans, but enjoy enormous influence.
The issue is that there is a clear risk to democracy and everyone is in a panic to figure out how to save the democracy - so extreme measures seem okay to people temporarily and in this instance. It’s just that the different sides have the opposite idea of what the risk is and what those measures should be... everyone on both sides is so panicked right now
Have you checked the news the last few days? Plenty of people out there are stupid enough to fall for this and much worse.
Which is exactly the point. Why keep being a democracy when we don't trust the voters to do the right thing?
The posts in question are there to organize an armed assault next week, before the inauguration. The literal planning of an illegal act is where the "free exchange of ideas" argument falls flat.
Your rhetorical question reads to me no differently than "Why bother giving people freedom in the first place if we're just going to punish them whenever they murder someone? We might as well just drop the pretense and imprison everybody by default"
Some of the richest companies in the world are actively dedicated to pushing people to the fringes because they make more money that way. Blaming voters seems a little unfair to me.
We use to call representatives, particularly Senators, Statesmen. They were elected to represent the interests of their State [government] and not that of the people or themselves.
The voters voted out the current president. "Stop the steal" is an attempt to override the voters' decision.
The answer is, most likely, yes. Please do not take this statement as malice - I'm an outside observer, but I believe the massive failings of the US education system are well documentated.
There is nothing wrong with conservatism, but for whatever reason there is a strong correlation between the right (at least in the last few years) and poor education.
I'd say most here can probably figure it out. I'm not saying I never get duped, but I can at least spot a total conman when I see one. It would appear many cannot.
Simply propagating the meme could put Facebook at risk for providing aid or comfort to an insurrection.
Yes. Yes we are.
That's not censorship. It's Fb's and other social media's desperate attempt to appease new government to prevent strong legislation, such as being held liable for their user's content, forced real names, regulation, and breakup.
> social media's desperate attempt to appease new government to prevent strong legislation, such as being held liable for their user's content
That's an interesting hypothesis, but doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. It's the current administration that's been calling for the repeal of Section 230, which is what would make platforms liable for their user's content.
Dems have been calling for the repeal/replace/amendment of Section 230 because they believe that 230 shields social media platforms from too much liability.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkeamz/elizabeth-warrens-pla...
Trump and the GOP would never actually have repealed 230, it was just a stalking-horse. The social media companies started shutting Trump down literally hours after it became apparent that the Senate committees that can regulate them will soon be chaired by Democrats.
Coincidentally, it was also the same day insurrectionists invaded the nation's capitol, after using social media to coordinate the violent attack.
"Stop the Steal" is one of their rallying cries.
Yes, the question really is are they liable for the violence that's produced through their algorithms?
> the violence that's produced through their algorithms
I'm sorry, but please justify or rephrase this. People chose to do violent things. Social media may indeed be an accelerant, but someone kept providing fuel and someone was asking "my kingdom for a match!" (or more accurately, "a match for my kingdom!"). And in response, a large number were prepared to provide matches and light fires.
Or you know, as US based companies with large US citizen workforces and executives, they possibly have some actual strong opinions about a despotic regime taking over their country.
That would've been plausible until before last Wednesday. But, considering the only rational explanation for those events seems a plan to apply the provisions of the Insurrection Act to prevent the act of formal election, waiting until after the failure of such plan seems opportunistic and not supportive of your interpretation.
Facebook has actively known they were inciting extremism on both sides forever. They do it on purpose to make more money. If Zuckerberg does care, it's apparently not very much and only to save himself from jail or the chopping block.
The day they replaced our time-based feeds to display more ads via algorithms, the clock started ticking...the alarm is now ringing.
Tell me that when Facebook goes back and removes all the "russiagate" conspiracy theories.
These are surreal times, to put it mildly. These headlines of banning/deplatforming would be ordinary if you substitute "CCP" for "Facebook", "Twitter", and "Amazon".
Facebook has even blocked Ron Paul?!? (https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1348704640486014982)
FAANG is the bakery, and Trump and everything associated with him is the same-sex wedding cake.
1. That case ended with the conclusion that the bakery could deny service because it would otherwise be “compelled speech”
2. Political beliefs are not a protected class like sexual orientation (should they be?)
Given that, this seems like even more of an open and shut case: businesses have a right to decide who they serve.
> That case ended with the conclusion that the bakery could deny service because it would otherwise be “compelled speech”
No, it ended with the conclusion that the particular state panel that rules against the baker did so with impermissible religious animus against his beliefs, and therefore the ruling against him was unconstitutional. “Compelled speech" was what a broad political group wanted the Court to rule on, but it's not what it did rule on, instead issuing a much more limited decision that dodged the broad issue almost entirely.
Ron Paul is racist. He should have lost his voice long ago. https://www.vice.com/en/article/5gw353/yeah-ron-paul-is-raci...
As long as Facebook is attempting to care about the spread of misinformation, can they nuke the various Flat Earth groups? I swear those people provide breeding stock for almost every other conspiracy theory on the planet.
They are just appeasing the Democrats before they take control and break them up. Big Tech has had no issue offering services to third world dictatorships but when Americans drink the same koolaid, suddenly it's a pressing issue!
Just to be clear, I am not blaming them, I am just pointing out the hypocrisy.
Or it was because of a literal coup attempt last week.
Facebook facilitates coups all over the place. Successfull ones, even! They care now because the democrats can actually do something in retaliation.
It's weird that Americans became so ineffective when COVID came and they had to coup from home.
I see removing "stop the steal" posts as an attempt to prevent violence. Flat earth groups aren't trying to incite violence as far as I've seen.
While we're at it, let's remove internet access from everyone with mental disorders. Clearly they can't handle the responsibilities of internet access. /s
We could just start requiring a university account for connection to the internet and finally end the eternal September! /s
Surely, this is sarcasm? If not, then I guess as a society we're starting to be okay with just outright silencing people.
Do these people have a right to broadcast their views on Facebook and be heard?
Does anyone have a right to mass audiences? No.
As long as we’re talking about banning people for saying things against the consensus view, we can wipe the books of Galileos name
This is a false equivalency. Facebook, unlike the Catholic Church 500 years ago, doesn't rule anything.
We’re taking about promoting the idea of deplatforming people on a massive scale because of their beliefs. I’m sorry the idea of resisting that offends so many people and I never thought hn would be the place it’s promoted so strongly
Edit: these aren’t nazis were taking about, they’re people who get a kick out of using the scientific method in a mistaken way
No, they just control the world's largest public square.
Yeah - a private company. Before them people found ways to communicate that didn't prey on the weak parts of human psychology. Why not use those methods now? Why is a private service provider beholden to any crackpot? Is the argument being made that the government should be in charge of how private companies moderate their content? Or just that you disagree with Facebook's choice? If it's the latter, that's fine, we can disagree. If it's the former you're getting into some awfully murky logical territory.
My position is that when a private company has so much power that it rivals nation states in the control it can exert on public discourse, it should be limited in similar ways to the way we limit political power with first ammendment protections. The case for such free speech protections is essentially the same as the case for the first ammendment restrictions on government power. Arguably, the case is even stronger, since private corporations have no democratic accountability.
Tell me how this is wrong:
The US is de facto converting to the Chinese model for the internet: All communication must be monitored, damaging content must be erased, and in serious cases, those responsible must be punished.
If Parler gets a foreign data center, I expect a "Great Firewall of China" with American characteristics will soon follow.
Facebook is not a country, it's a website, trying to characterize Facebook's business decisions as U.S policy is a dishonest rhetorical tactic.
Honest question: Is Facebook doing this out of genuine business interest? Or because they're concerned about legal and/or regulatory backlash?
What’s the difference? Business interests include mitigating legal and regulatory exposure.
Because the latter would definitely be a form of government censorship. In fact it's essentially how most censorship in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey work.
If you tell a newspaper that they'll be regulated out of existence if they publish a certain opinion, it doesn't matter that the private platform is the one doing the censoring.
There's always a risk of bad laws and bad regulations. And certainly we need to be vigilant and correct and improve them when they occur (and they most certainly do). Laws and regulation are not necessarily censorship. It's important to have transparency into how laws and regulations are developed and applied, but that's a separate issue.
Honest question: What happens to Facebook if the government that rules it collapses?
Honest question: What is your probability estimate that the government of the United States collapses or is overthrown? Keep in mind that the S&P 500 is near record highs, which would be a tad irrational if we're on the verge anarchy implosion.
If you honestly believe there's even the slightest risk of that, why aren't you buying deep out-of-the-money put options like mad.
What is this question? First - I don't have a probability estimate. I simply recognize the fact that some significant part of the populating tried to overthrow the government.
Second, you should be careful conflating Wall Street with the stability of the country. That's not how our monetary policy or economic system work.
> Facebook is not a country
Facebook 2019 revenue was 71 billion or so, which would put it at number 70 worldwide if it were a country. Maybe we should start to treat it like one.
I don't follow your reasoning. Should we treat every billion dollar company as a country or just websites?
If you are such a juggernaut maybe you cannot hide anymore behind the "we are a private company so we can do whatever we want" defense. At 70 billion revenue your impact in society is huge, you are effectively affecting millions of humans.
> maybe you cannot hide anymore behind the "we are a private company so we can do whatever we want" defense
No such defense exists. Should we treat every billion dollar company as a country?
> No such defense exists
No such defense exists? Have you read this site every time a new wave of social media cancellations happen? After every credit card processing company ban a group of polemical people?
"They are a private company they can decide what to do"
Well, maybe if you are extracting 70 billion a year from society it is not that simple as "I can decide who to do business with"
I think the government would be very interested to initiate an investigation if Shell decided to not fill your tank because they discovered you are a neo-Keynesian, even if there is a Chevron station 3 miles away.
> Have you read this site every time a new wave of social media cancellations happen? After every credit card processing company ban a group of polemical people?
Every company is allowed to do "whatever they want" if you define "whatever they want" as "legally refuse to do business with an individual"
> I think the government would be very interested to initiate an investigation if Shell decided to not fill your tank because they discovered you are a neo-Keynesian, even if there is a Chevron station 3 miles away
What? Of course they wouldn't, companies are free to do business with whomever they choose as long as they do not discriminate against a protected class. People who post "stop the steal" is not protected, nor is it a class of people, it is a behavior prohibited by the rules of the platform.
> I think the government would be very interested to initiate an investigation if Shell decided to not fill your tank because they discovered you are a neo-Keynesian, even if there is a Chevron station 3 miles away.
Even if that was true, which it is not generally in the US, that's not analogous to what is happening. It's more like if Shell, instead of selling gas for money, was a peer-to-peer gas exchange service, and they decided not to let you participate because the traits of the specific formulation of gas you were providing didn't conform to what they wanted in their exchange network.
Yeah, what is the trait of the credit card companies,patreon and the hosting companies? Take care of your back, dont bend that much backwards.
It also has 2.7 billions active users.
This is why I said "de facto".
I'm not implying the US government was behind this.
I'm suggesting that the end results in US and China are similar in some ways, though implemented by different actors.
No, the result is not even remotely similar. This is an individual company removing content from their own website based on their own prerogatives, not a country-wide ban where citizens risk imprisonment or worse if they violate the rules. The differences are so incredibly vast that I'm struggling to believe you're actually making this argument in good faith.
I think there's quite a step from "don't use AWS to plot a violent overthrow of the United States Government" to all communication being monitored and a firewall blocking foreign sources.
Why should Facebook and Amazon use their resources to help this cause?
I think it’s quite a step to say all comments with the phrase Stop the steal want to overthrow the government.
We, as a society, should be allowed to be very critical of our election process. Stifling discussions about the legitimacy of the election actually reduces my confidence in the election process. I’ve listen to their arguments and I didn’t believe them, but I feel good that people are allowed to do openly question election process and I trust the American people to make rational decisions about what constitutes a fair election.
I don't think anyone is stopping you from discussing the electoral process. What they are stopping is a specific campaign that transitioned from questioning to violence. The violence is the problem.
You have to accept that there is a difference between questioning the results of an election and walking into the Capitol, killing a cop, and wrecking the place up. "The line" on what gets you deplatformed exists somewhere between those two points.
Can you explain how this rule is meant to work? So if someone supports an idea and then commits violence then discussion of this idea should be removed from the public square. I don't see any evidence that the 'stop the steal' campaign organized the violence in the Capitol. This just seems to be a game of association. A bunch of people who committed illegal violent acts believe X, people using the slogan Y also believe X so any use of slogan Y should be removed from the public square.
It looks like the original reason the 'stop the steal' page was removed from Facebook was for 'misinformation' and now they are blacklisting the slogan because it's associated with 'misinformation' and they also believe that talking about such things causes violence.
I think you are heading in the right direction here. I think the difference is that today large US tech companies have a complete stranglehold over online speech and large parts of the internet infrastructure(email, web services, consumer electronics). So instead of the CCP saying a site is transmitting harmful lies(and is shut down), its now a close knit group of tech oligarchies deeming what speech is and is not permissible.
If Parler were to try and get a foreign data center expect Goog, FB and the others to try to bully that country (we will remove offices in your country if you do not shut it down) or pressuring internet providers to block that countries traffic.
Hong-Kong rioters and Capitol rioters both protested against a democratically elected government (or soon to be) but the former were called dissidents and got the support of USA tech corps[1] while the latter are called terrorists and are heavily censored. These tech corps are full of bullshit and shall not be trusted when it come to democracy or free internet.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/hong-kong-securi...
I would offer two counter examples:
1. It is individuals and individual companies making these decisions, it is not federally required. (And if it was federally mandated, I’m sure impropriety could be handled by the courts.)
2. Companies are censoring the president, one of the main actors of the federal government.
This is hugely different from the Chinese model, where the Chinese government restricts things which are negative towards the government among other things.
At any rate, I’m sure many of the technical reasons are legitimate. For example, does AWS permit you to host bounty-hunting sites, where you could be paid to kill others? I doubt it, and I imagine many people support that stance, even if they do not support kicking Parler. So we admit that some censorship is ok and even beneficial. Therefore, what’s the line? Is it content which is promoting literal illegal activity? Content that likely will lead to illegal actions?
If that’s the case, then perhaps we should be advocating that these rules ought to be applied more evenly to even more types of sites and content. Or, perhaps the rules are applied evenly, and there have simply not been many other similar cases regarding AWS which have gained popularity.
Or, maybe AWS should enforce no rules whatsoever. Then they could become a haven for criminal sites, thus loosing their brand.
At any rate, this seems very different from China, and I’m yet to be convinced that we have started some sort of slippery slope.
It's wrong because you're conflating the US private companies with the Chinese government.
The results on limiting discussions are largely the same if it’s done by the government or done by corporations.
You're putting the cart before the horse. No government body ordered any of this.
Trump approval remains at 40%, that's more than enough to build counter-platforms for literally everything.
I would like to welcome this as an opportunity to break the power of major tech corporations and move towards open platforms.
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be towards closed platforms that are simply echo chambers of a different persuasion.
The US is becoming like China?
Billionaire tech magnate Jack Ma vs. Xi Jinping: who got to censor who?
<lots of American counterparts> vs. Donald Trump: same question...
Seems like the precise opposite.
A failure of critical thinking skills at the national level or willful ignorance?
Both. People just believe what they want. When presented with new information they will adjust the new information or explain it away rather than change their belief system (and admit they were wrong). It takes courage to admit your were wrong, and most people don't have it. Politicians, especially.
Courageous or not, politicians are never rewarded for admitting mistakes.
There's always enough of the former to go around.
It's too bad that critical thinking and rationality aren't considered integral elements of preparing students to join the workforce.
The “Arab Street” comes to America.
The term is apparently derogatory in nature, but imo it is an effective political metaphor for socio-political regimes that prominently feature bifurcated societies of ruling elite and voiceless governed masses: the palace and the street/market.
The “word on the street” has currency with the masses and nearly every utterance of the ‘palace’ is mistrusted, scrutinized, and parsed to the n-th degree to glean “the actual truth”. Conversely, the palace considers the word on the street to be irrational, volatile, and destabilizing, and dismisses it in its entirety as misunderstandings of “the common and the ignorant”.
It remains a minor puzzle as to why Soviet “misinformation” beamed via shortwave as Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, and other fellow red states were never, afaik, jammed in the West, yet in 21st century, western heads are deemed extra sensitive to bad information and need to be protected from exposure to content that poses some sort of social and moral hazard.
It is helpful to remember that the only states doing the jamming (“to stop enemy propaganda and misinformation”) were authoritarian regimes, and imho instructive to reflect on why that is the case.
Actions taken by the US info-tech cartel recently will only serve to deepen the national divide, and (per historic patterns) erode the legitimacy of establishment voices and institutions.
[edited]
Hm, I just posted "stop the steal" on my Facebook page (along with a disclaimer), and it's still there six minutes later. Maybe it takes 24 hours to get picked up? Or do they just cloak the posting?
In most cases you'd be shadow-banned. (The post looks fine to you, but is invisible to everyone else.)
Or, they just put their thumbs on the scale and make sure your post isn't shown to anyone (or very few people) rather than your typical audience.
Okay. A non-friend was able to view it a few seconds ago, so it's definitely not totally invisible. But I only have about 600 friends (haha) so I guess they don't care about small fry.
If they have 1.73 billion daily users, that's a lot of data to scan. I'm guessing they'll only go after the big fish.
Facebook's shadowban mechanism is more elaborate than that. They will still show the post to people they think you are closest to, while hiding it from the general newsfeed where most things show.
The Facebook newsfeed is quite similar to TV, because you can only change channels, but have very little control over what is displayed.
How do you know how Facebook's shadowban mechanism works? Has it been reverse-engineered? My search-fu us failing me.
Either he's personally familiar with the system or he has taken a theory and extrapolated upwards. I'm leaning towards the latter.
Did you just assume my gender?
I can't tell you that, I'm sorry.
Every post gets scanned. They detect things like blacklisted links in real-time.
Algorithms. It will find you eventually.
Shadow banning is some real underhanded sh#t. On reddit I explained that mayor Pete's M4A wasn't the same M4A as the world understood it. A user immediately responds accusing of me editing my comment to deceive. I say prove it you f#cking liar, there are services that archive. Then I'm hit with the ban for being profane and harassing. Yup, turns out the comment had been very quickly shadow-banned lol. I should have known. But this might inform people that its not only conservatives who's speech is threatened; it's anyone who speaks contrary to the mainstream.
People who use profanity and personal insults tend to heavily degrade the quality of a forum. And when banned, they react angrily and make alternate accounts again and again.
A shadowban reduces the incentive to dodge bans via new usernames. Reddit mods don’t have Ip address access or other tools, so shadowbans are a necessary tool.
You weren’t banned for speaking contrary to the mainstream. You were banned for insults and personal attacks, indicating you weren’t likely to lead to productive conversations.
Hey I broke the rules, what can I say. But that wasn't really the point. This is also an interesting take on profanity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13412107
But let me actually amend my comment above here, it wasn't even that bad, the actual words were "lying a#s." I just felt like there was an interaction that didn't need to happen because people see different sets of comments, my original comment being nothing but fact and dry. I don't know how we can talk much about profanity derailing discussion when discussion is so fundamentally broken.
Yeah I actually do think that the profanity can indicate more honesty. The trouble is, if it’s also combined with a personal attack on others it inflames conversations. Two people can then rile themselves up and derail an entire thread.
Of course the comment replying to you did the same thing: made a personal attack on you, and it derailed you into a personal attack with swearing.
Sure. And what's most interesting to me is that both personal attacks and swearing were caused by this underhanded version of censorship. It in effect caused what it is supposed to solve.
Is it true that a very active participant on Reddit was shadow banned a while back, and he didn't realize it for two years?
Happens every day. Mods can do a form of shadowbanning on a specific subreddit. So the very active and unaware can keep posting and posting and not know.
I don’t necessarily think this is unreasonable if used judiciously against the type of account which has shown unwillingness to heed rules or mod warnings.
> But this might inform people that its not only conservatives who's speech is threatened
Agree that it's all over the place, but it's depressing to see left's attitude that they have the numbers now to attack the same free speech which helped so many efforts in the last twenty years.
I have some experience on doing this type of work for large publications. We would always show the user their own content but would not show it to anyone else.
Facebook goes an extra step and displays it for people you're closest to while hiding it for others.
That's kind of creepy, actually.
It's not entirely clear what they are filtering from this article. They might just be filtering pages, groups, and articles with he name in the title.
Something like this. https://github.com/tessalt/echo-chamber-js
You might have a high enough meta score to get away with it. If you create a brand new account and post "stop the steal" it will probably be dead instantly. Or if you have a long history of posting unfounded inflammatory conspiracy theories.
Should the US government make its own social network? That would cut off all kinds of issues. Only content that is literally illegal would be removed. Everyone would be guaranteed access.
Spam alone would eliminate its utility.
Spam can be blocked, though, right? Edit: To address the commenter below, Congress has addressed spam before, in the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
Ok, so the rule is now:
Only content that is literally illegal or is spam would be removed.
See where this is going? It is hard to craft rules that allow everything without leaving a site unusable.
>It is hard to craft rules that allow everything without leaving a site unusable
Does government cheese have to be tasty? The point is to provide the public square, in all its public square glory. If you want something slick and curated, you're going to have to give up some rights.
Imagine a spam filter for social media. I actively want this.
There's already a law that says advertising messages have to be labelled as such (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003). Shouldn't be too challenging. Is anyone really going to violate the law on a government website?
It could also be funded by tax dollars solving the targeted advertising problem, and all data on it could be given 4th amendment protections solving the big brother problem.
Sort of an electronic post office, perhaps?
1st.gov would be a neat domain name.
I was thinking publicsquare.gov, but this is a good one too.
There is more to Section 230 than commonly mentioned. There is IMHO a nice tutorial at
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
I get why Facebook is doing this, but suppressing the discussion of this false claim of election fraud is going to make it more likely that when an election actually is stolen, that companies like Facebook are more likely to stamp out the discussion to match earlier precedent.
To be fair, these Big Social companies wouldn't want their ad impressions audited either.
im saying this because it seems like such an obvious point but i havent seen it here- why are people who want the government to be replaced by the "free market" allowed to be upset that private companies are silencing them? what is the rationale for squaring this circle
The opposite of a contradiction is another contradiction.
Why are people that believe in regulation of the world's largest corporations suddenly laissez-faire libertarians?
If you have opposed the Citizen's United ruling for a decade, don't suddenly act like you care about a corporation's civil liberties, including freedom of association and freedom of expression.
The answer is obvious: both sides want power more than they want to stick to their expressed ideals.
You’re unintentionally making a straw man. There is no contradiction.
I believe social media should be regulated more tightly. Until then they have the freedom to remove the content according to their TOS.
Just because I’m pointing out that they have the freedom it doesnt mean I believe they should continue to have the freedom.
Government regulations are desperately needed.
Even more so, government enforcement of existing regulations are needed. There’ve been many threats of violence on social media with few being investigated.
That's a good way of putting it. I think this happens often - the progressive/leftist/etc. position involves multiple points of departure from our current society, and if you try to look at the merits of any single strand by itself, it falls apart.
For instance, many progressives are advocates of people losing their jobs for harassing coworkers. If you look at this position in isolation, it looks like they're arguing for a cold corporatism, that anyone who threatens the reputation of the corporation should be thrown onto the streets. However, many progressives are also advocates of stronger social safety nets for people who lose their jobs, whether by their own misdeeds or misfortune - from increased unemployment (or even UBI), to stronger tenants' protections, to government-provided healthcare. Firing someone for their misdeeds is much less cruel once those safety nets are in place, and the moral calculus very rapidly shifts to protecting their coworkers.
Or they should be regulated in some ways but not others. There's a big distance between "run by the govt" and "totally free of govt meddling".
I haven't really made my mind up one way or the other about FB, Twitter, et al.'s actions these past couple weeks, but simultaneously believing that corporations should be limited in their electioneering activities and that they should be allowed to moderate the content that appears on their platforms does not seem like a contradiction to me.
I get that people tend to cluster into two main groups in the US, and that this seems to be strongly encouraged by the existing power structures.
I would also argue that there are a lot of folks (myself included) that see the curtailing of speech - regardless of "side", as a real long-term threat to productive and open communication. We need actual discourse and understanding, or all we're going to get is more us-vs-them polarization and ramping up of rhetoric and violence.
I strongly disagree with most of the opinions being voiced on the (far) right, but if they don't happen in the open they will fester into something grotesque and far more dangerous. Just because I'm disgusted by the opinions of a group of people doesn't it's a good idea for me to make the situation worse by silencing them. Not least of all because we will eventually reap what we've sowed once they grab power again.
I still can't help but shake the feeling that there are those with a real vested interest in a continuing and growing divide (and conquering) of the populace, regardless of the (externalized) cost.
Inversions are happening faster than ever. The red and blue tribes swap their positions in sync at this point.
I'm an engineer, not an ideologue, and don't make it a practice of painting myself into a corner just to be consistent. Though I think the big tech companies have too much power, I think the need to avoid having the US government overthrown by a violent coup trumps other considerations. The material they are shutting down includes plans for next weekend to attack both Washington DC and state capitals. Some innocent content could be swept up in this.
Once all this calms down, we can address the excessive power of the platforms with antitrust, so there are more of them to choose from.
I think the government has too much power and the cost of losing the presidency shouldn't be so traumatic.
So much of the executive craziness of the last 4 years is due to the ever growing power of the executive branch and executive orders being de facto law.
All this presidential overreach is about to (hypocritically) be put to use and further expanded.
Historical times!
I believe that Facebook, structurally, should not exist. I don't believe that it's good for society to have corporations that are this large and this powerful.
I also believe that every association of citizens should have civil liberties. I have no desire or plans to become Facebook, but I want the freedom to make much smaller companies (or collectives, or charitable organizations, or whatever) and have the discretion to associate with whomever I want. If that right is taken away from Facebook, I am harmed.
If the ability to become Facebook-scale is taken away from Facebook, I am not harmed, because I have no interest in doing so. So that's what I advocate.
(If you search through my comment history, you can see this is not a new belief for me, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19338090 from two years ago agreeing unironically with Paul Graham's strawman suggestion that Google should not exist, or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24797482 from three months ago arguing in favor of Elizabeth Warren's proposal, and motivation, to break up Big Tech in a specific way following specific principles.)
If your side wants power more than you want to stick to your expressed ideals, go ahead, but don't drag me down to your level. My side's ideals look like an opportunistic and self-contradictory version of laissez-faire libertarianism simply because our position is not laissez-faire libertarianism at all.
I fully support regulating and/or breaking up Facebook. However, my preferred regulation would not prevent them from moderating misinformation on their platform.
"stop the steal" isn't simply misinformation: it's about planning violence for next weekend. Facebook doesn't have to allow its platform to be used to try again to overturn the presidential election and harm any politician or police officer who resists.
The people who are supportive of this move by Facebook and similar moves by other tech companies aren’t motivated by a newfound sense of liberalism. Many have been arguing that the government should have been forcing FB et al to do this kind of stuff (ie, stopping “hate speech”) for years now.
Which brings us full circle, to state sanctioned firewalls (China).
The negation of a contradiction is a tautology:
¬(A & ¬A) = ¬A | A = True
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don’t see a contradiction here. The point of classical liberalism is well-regulated capitalism. Economic freedom combined with a rule of law to protect the citizenry. You can want to regulate Twitter and believe they have the freedom to kick whoever they want off their platform without a contradiction.
This. Regulation would be of harmful misinformation. Arguably, these companies are late in their self-regulation. People were tired of the endless excuses for double standards.
In other words, corporations should be able to do whatever they wish within the rules, but in order for that to happen, there should be rules.
Nobody is switching sides, I don't care one bit about corporations getting hit with regulation. In fact, I'm for it.
That has nothing to do with enjoying watching this chickens come home to roost.
They want the government to replaced by the free market for other people. For them, it's government benefits all the way.
The political scientist and author Frank Wilhoit talked about it in his works:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
My perspective as a conservative:
1. These companies have every right to legally censor those they disagree with.
2. By exercising that right they put themselves at risk of being regulated more stringently (as utilities for example) when they demonstrate inelasticity in consumer choice.
3. I'd rather them not be treated as utilities because that hampers competition and thus impedes efficiency.
4. Your statement above is a farcical caricature of conservative ideology. Every product/service deserves a debate on what regulation is appropriate but as a society regulation only exists because bad actors necessitated its creation. No one wants car seats for their 8 year olds - we'd much rather be trusted to do the right thing.
FYI, the political scientist Frank Wilhoit didn't write this, although he has written similar things.
The quote was made by a different Frank Wilhoit on the Crooked Timber blog / community.
Investigative work here: https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1183470106816331776
I'm pretty sure you're confusing two people with the same name. Francis Wilhoit the author/political scientist died in 2010:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit
The quote you're referring to is from a comment on a web page left in 2018:
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
The name in the comment links to his site:
He's a music composer.
Errrhm, all the "protected classes" tend to come from the left wing ideologies. Sure, the right isn't what it used to be with Jeffersonian liberalism and free speech, but that quote could easily be interpreted to be about modern left by simply replacing "Conservatism" with "Liberalism'.
'The right' as a term literally comes from supporters of the nobility and the king, the ultimate representation of someone who is protected but not bound by the law.
The term “right” comes from the delegates seating in the French National Assembly during the revolution. Both the Left (Jacobins) and the Right (Girondists) voted together to behead the King and dispense with all noble priveledges and titles.
These people wanted to return to an aristocracy according to wikipedias history section of right wing, so his point stands I think.
But I'm not knowledgeable about history, so do elaborate if you know details please.
Girondists? Aristocracy?! No way. There were many royalists in France, but none in the National Assembly.
The Girondists were considered right only because Jacobins were super left and ended up killing thousands of priests, what few nobles they could still find, tens of thousands of suspected royalists in mass executions, and eventually the Girondists themselves too for being too soft. The Girondists went to the guillotine singing The Marseilles! Certainly not the royalists that lot.
I recommend the “Revolutions” podcast - about 30 hours worth of the French Revolution is better than any movie.
Also the history of revolutions is very educational in this day and age. I for one hope we will never experience anything like it.
They supported the French king against violent revolutionaries who executed him, imposed arbitrary cultural changes such as abandoning the calendar, and undertook a series of mass executions and purges until they were finally brought under control by Napoleon.
That doesn't seem to be what the quote is focused on though, where most efforts around "protected classes" come from. I think it does a rather good job highlighting it's point about conservative central hyperfocus on the supremacy of an in-group. Seems to be a pretty strong candidate for an underlying proposition at least, given some of the imagery we've seen over the past days.
What left wing ideologies would that be?
the Frankfurt school and critical theorists probably.
> […] all the "protected classes" tend to come from the left wing ideologies.
You don’t know what the term “protected class” means, and you should probably stop using it.
“Woman” isn’t a protected class, “sex” is. “Christian” isn’t a protected class, “religion” is.
To be fair, not all protected classes are symmetric:
Veteran status and age over 40 are notable examples; you are absolutely permitted to discriminate against non-veterans and against people under 40.
yes everyone who disagrees with you is a hypocrite and dumb and it’s impossible they may have actual reasoning behind their thoughts. you’re very empathetic
This comment is what is called "attacking the strawman".
Not op - but please provide an explanation that counters the argument, then. Seriously, I would really like to understand how to come to terms with two world views that appear to be diametrically opposed within the same movement.
It’s not unusual to see a newcomer decrying HN as hypocritical, where in reality it’s just not a uniform group but many different people with different opinions becoming prominent at different times.
Many accusations of hypocrisy boil down to just that - different people with different opinions treated by the outsiders as a homogenous group.
Most of them aren’t in it for ideology but the shared victimhood. They go along with the ideology because most of the donor funding wants the ideology to be Conservative. These people were New Deal Democrats before the civil rights movement.
The chronology of that association doesn’t work. Democrats were staunch opponents of civil rights until the 1960s. Even then, more republicans supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than Democrats.
Even in 1976, Carter won with the traditional new deal coalition of southerners and northeast progressives. He won South Carolina by the same margin as Massachusetts. Even in 1980 against Reagan, Carter performed much closer to Reagan in the south than his overall national performance (outright winning Georgia, but coming close in most southern states).
The current alignment of southern states with Republicans really dates to the late 1980s to early 1990s, when Republicans started flipping Senate seats in the south.
Pinning this on Democrats’ support for the Civil Rights Act two decades before is one theory, but another is the industrialization of the southern economy. Southern New Deal Democrats represented agricultural states against protectionist northern industrial interests. But look at the economy of places like Georgia and Tennessee today. They’re built on low taxes and low regulation to draw companies away from high tax high regulation northern states. That started happening in the 1980s. Georgia is a really archetypal example of this: it’s probably the most openly pro-business big city in the country, and has a famously cooperative relationship between Atlanta Democratic mayors and Georgia Republican governors centered around attracting companies from places like New York: https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional-govt--politics/with...
All chronologies of the 2 major parties in the US are flawed because the parties spent the 20th century switching their positions. The exodus of southern racists from the Democratic party in the mid-century controls almost all the polarization in our politics. Reagan gets a lot of blame for being at the helm during the rise of the moral majority, but if you read Perlstein, the coalition Reagan was backed by has its roots in Goldwater's southern strategy.
It is no more reasonable to say that Democrats were staunch opponents of civil rights into the 1960s (Truman integrated the military!) than it is to say that Republicans were religious conservatives. Southern Democrats opposed civil rights, and Northern Republicans were New Deal economic populists.
I did the (probably pointless) exercise a few years ago of reading the GOP party platform documents from 1972 through 2012, tagging each with specific issues like "block grant benefits to states" or "oppose campaign finance restrictions". I don't believe for a moment that these documents are representative of the real party, but it's interesting that you can watch the GOP's position change so clearly over time. Into the late 1970s, the GOP was open to abortion!
The parties have held relatively coherent positions since the 1980s; I think when people talk about the roles the parties have had in US history, as opposed to specific politicians, we should probably limit ourself to the parties of Reagan and Mondale and their successors.
There are broad features of the parties that haven't changed that are necessary to understand the timeline of southern realignment.
Republicans had been trying to win southern whites since the turn of the 20th century. That caused a large number of African Americans to abandon the party. They started voting overwhelmingly Democrat in 1936.
But the Democratic Party didn't support the Civil Rights Act until 1964. And the south remained solidly Democratic well into the 1980s, outside of Presidential contests. Many completely white rural southern counties voted for Carter and Clinton. What explains that timeline?
You have to look at the economics and the law. FDR's Democratic Party was recognizably modern: technocratic, and proponents of the administrative state, regulation, and economic redistribution. Southern whites stayed in this coalition because the south was poor and agrarian, and had interests averse to those of northern businesses. New Deal programs were instrumental in industrializing the southern economy: https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/.... In 1930, the southeast was the poorest region, with half the national average income. By 1970, the gap had closed dramatically, to 80%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/comparing-wealth-u-s-geogra...
The Republican Party, meanwhile, continued to be a small-government, anti-regulation party during this time. Goldwater tried to win the south by opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on small-government grounds, and while that worked in a few deep-south states, he lost every normally Republican state except Arizona.
By the time Reagan came along, a couple of things had changed:
1) The south's economy had dramatically industrialized, creating prosperous suburbs of the kind Reagan won all over the country.
2) The legal debate over the Civil Rights Act had long since been replaced by debates over affirmative action. The 1980 Republican Platform reflects this:
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p... ("However, equal opportunity should not be jeopardized by bureaucratic regulations and decisions which rely on quotas, ratios, and numerical requirements to exclude some individuals in favor of others, thereby rendering such regulations and decisions inherently discriminatory.").
With the illegality of de jure discrimination settled by Brown v. Board, and commercial discrimination settled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the debate shifted to addressing what we'd call today "structural racism." And on that point, the Reagan platform reflects the same limited-government Republican ideology that existed since before Hoover. And Democrats' support for government intervention and affirmative action reflected their broader 20th century ideology as well.
FWIW, I happen to side with Democrats on this one, at least with respect to economic interventions. But the parties have more or less the positions you’d expect ideologically.
There is a good book that covers this: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691133898/th.... It gives a similar but slightly more nuanced take than Pearlstein, which I don't think is wrong, just incomplete and a bit misleading.
TL;DR version
1) Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964, winning no Republican states other than his own, proved that opposing the civil rights act of 1964 wasn’t tenable for either party. It’s not like Democrats could have beat Reagan had they opposed it. They would have lost their northern base, just as Goldwater lost the Republican base in 1964.
It’s one factor in the detachment of the south from the Democratic Party, but that detachment had been a long time coming due to economic changes.
2) By 1980, the debate shifted to affirmative action and quotas, where Republicans had a longstanding ideological basis for opposing government intervention.
It's not often I get to say that I think you're genuinely wrong, but here I think you're really far off the mark. Goldwater flipped the deep south (GA SC AL MS and LA). Nixon noticed and ran the same strategy in '68, by which point the entire south, wall-to-wall, was lined up behind the southern strategy (the states that didn't go for Nixon went for Wallace). I don't see any way you can read the history of the 1960s and 1970s as the Republican party running away from segregation; the opposite is true, and was literally recorded in newspaper features of the time:
https://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/phillips-souther...
(Similarly, I think you've collapsed the GOP of the 60s too far down; the Rockefeller Republicans were, on domestic policy, square in the middle of where the mainstream Democratic party is today. George Romney would have opposed AOC, but so does Gina Raimondo.)
At any rate, when people debate which is the "racist" party, they almost invariably ignore the fact that the US was a 4-party polity in the mid-century, not a 2-party polity. What's changed since then is that we have, from 1980 through today, sorted down to 2.
You're just incorrect to equate Goldwater with Nixon/Reagan, and to draw a straight line from supporting segregation to opposing affirmative action/bussing/etc.
Goldwater offered a libertarian justification for allowing the south to continue segregation. And what did that get him? He flipped five Deep South states, at the expense of losing every traditionally Republican state Nixon had won in 1960, with the exception of Arizona. Goldwater lost stalwart Republican states in the Great Plains and Mountain West, like Colorado, that had voted against FDR three out of four times. Supporting segregation was a political loser for Republicans.
Nixon and Reagan did not "run the same strategy." Neither supported segregation. They didn't have to. Democrats, having abandoned their segregationist wing, sought far-reaching government programs and social engineering to remedy economic and social disparities, as Democrats are wont to do. Nixon and Reagan pushed back on those policies, entirely consistent with Republican ideology.
This article does a good job explaining what really happened: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-myth-of-the-racist-re...
> The evidence suggests that the GOP advanced in the South because it attracted much the same upwardly mobile (and non-union) economic and religious conservatives that it did elsewhere in the country.
Republicans are a fusion of quite a few different people: https://dailycampus.com/2020/09/14/break-up-already-fusionis...
> Buckley used the pages of National Review to promote a ‘fusionism’ of sorts between paleo-conservatives, neo-conservatives, tea-party enthusiasts, the deeply religious, libertarians, social conservatives and free-marketeers.
Particularly since Trump, a lot of the base is now economically moderate or even liberal, but socially conservative. The social conservatives are the ones who are most worried about the social liberals having increased power over online media platforms.
Apart from that, the deregulatory conservatives don’t believe that criticizing some practice of private business means going further to impose government regulation. To them, there is a role for self regulation. And the social conservatives and traditional conservatives don’t care about using the power of government for perceived proper ends at all. They are quite mad, in fact, at the limited government conservatives for giving up so much ground on things like healthcare and unions over those issues.
One way to explain the apparent contradiction is that free markets aren’t the same as anarchy. Businesses should be free to compete, but that doesn’t mean they should be free to do anything they believe makes them more competitive. Free market supporters believe they are more efficient than alternatives, but there may be principles of more importance than efficiency.
Plus, certain behaviours are in the interests of specific businesses but damaging to free competition as a whole: monopolies, censorship, etc.
Sure: people who want more free market want the state to focus on regulation, instead of actually owning everything, competition is the motor of progress. For capitalism to function well it needs constant watch to prevent lobbying, monopolism and corruption in general. It needs bad companies to go bankrupt so the good companies flourish and it needs to ensure companies are focused on maximizing stakeholder profits up to, and not exceeding, their social and ecological obligations. Those social and ecological obligations were decided by the government by the people; whereas if companies start having political opinions they'll want to undermine the will of the people and do a disservice to their raison d'etre.
I think it is because all the big tech companies are eliminating popular dissent concerning the government, which makes many question if the government is in cahoots and using private companies to further public goals of censorship, which would be more difficult to do directly as government. It smells fishy at the very least.
Eliminating dissent?!?
Sure, watch as Biden berates black leaders. Tells one she can't read. Once you secure power, you don't necessarily like sharing it. Its like splitting the loot between thieves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3G7n21p0kY
Lenin after securing power, quickly killed off or imprisoned people in his own communist party that he deemed might pose him a threat. Sadly this included most of the well meaning people and idealists.
Hitchens narrates a great and chilling example of this:
Iraq's 1979 Fascist Coup, Narrated by Christopher Hitchens
Please stop using HN for ideological battle. Regardless of which ideology you're battling for, it's not what HN is for, and it destroys what it is for.
You've been doing it a lot lately, and we ban that sort of account. I'm not going to ban you right now, because you've also been posting good comments. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this, we'd appreciate it.
Okay, thank you for the warning. I'll refrain from politics on here.
yes.
> why are people who want the government to be replaced by the "free market" allowed to be upset that private companies are silencing them?
Because there isn't a free market, but a regulated market and there is a widespread perception (on both the left and the right) that the regulations are tilted in favor of the establishment and oligarchs, and against normal people, workers, consumers, and taxpayers.
Furthermore when there was protests which were marred by violence in 2020 the platforms were supportive of the protestors and continued to permit them to organize.
> what is the rationale for squaring this circle
If we want a free market, lets have a free market. If we want regulations, lets let those regulations reflect perspectives from both sides of the aisle. A regulated market for me, and a free market for thee, is not acceptable.
How are these companies regulated?
I don't understand the question. There are statutes that both refer to conduct and delegate power to make rules. Enforcement of these statutes is the responsibility of law enforcement officers.
You said or implied this was a regulated market.
there are regulations and people who enforce them in every country in the world. hence I affirm that this is a regulated market.
By asking the question you’re assuming the point is the have a rational argument on consistent beliefs - but it isn’t. It’s to gaslight and misdirect for political gain.
That is correct.
Any rationalization is post-hoc, done in support of the pre-existing (and pre-determined) goal.
As such, because it's entirely post-hoc, this leads to moving the goalposts, and any respective adjustments in rationalizations.
The primary question one must ask, in these circumstances:
Is my counterpart arguing in good faith?
If the signs point to bad faith (e.g., telltale language, gaslighting or similar methods employed, etc), then rational argument is not their currency.
Hi I'm a free market proponent, I'm totally fine with what's going on here.
Edit: My only thought is if people feel these companies are viewed as too critical to be self moderating than maybe these do need anti monopoly action to foster competition in the area. I absolutely do NOT agree with giving them any special statuses which would do the exact opposite of fostering competition.
My favorite example of how over the top things have become is that Google has monopolies inside of a monopoly. Youtube has something like 98% of the video streaming market.
Exactly! And then they make arguments like the content moderation argument going on to depend on them more! I want to depend on them less!
This is not hard to square.
If you believe in free markets as the most efficient mode of production and the most liberal way of life you will be against anything that undermines the freedom of the markets, be it private monopolization or governmental subjugation.
The question hotly debated is whether the Cabal of Twitter, FB, Reddit, and the like are large enough to distort the playing field through the sheer gravity of their scale. If you agree that they are you have to agree they have undermined the free market, and markets need to be rescued.
In the similar vein - you can argue that the only valid use of violence is to stop unsanctioned use of violence. There is no contradiction in both supporting and opposing use of violence at the same time.
Cartels are not “free market”, they represent a failure of the free market which legislation (i.e. government empowerment by guns) is supposed to solve.
There’s no ideological consistency to be had here. But I don’t think either side has ideological purity... which is good!
But I do find it strange that people seem to think you can attempt a coup of the worlds most powerful country and face virtually no consequence or blowback? As the Emerson quote goes “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
People are allowed to be upset for any reason or no reason at all.
Actually wait, being upset is not something you need permission for.
When the government created some protected classes that told private enterprise how to behave, people began implicitly believing that every person has a right to a protected status.
The very fact huge government still exists? Big tech choosing the leaders of said huge government?
Facebook isn’t really a participant in a free market they’ve been crushing competition for years
Crushing competition is certainly a thing that can happen in a free market.
Isn’t a free market the lack of any government regulation and leaving it up to the “Invisible Hand”? With that definition, monopolies are still “free market”. I guess it depends on your definition of “free market”?
Companies with a monopoly often have them because of government regulation. Copyright being the best example of shutting out other players in the market.
Pure markets are impossible in these environments
That's my understanding.
Because insidious connections between government and big business is called "fascism", and free market people are opposed to that. Those who don't acknowledge/comprehend this issue yet are claiming to defend a "free market" are called "vulgar libertarians":
"Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because "that’s not how the free market works" — implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of "free market principles."" -- Kevin Carson
An ideology is a story / model of the world. And all models are lies (and some models are useful).
There's a few ideologies / models going on here. Eg:
- A company is like a person, with all the rights of free expression and self governance. From that perspective, twitter and FB are free to have whatever systems of regulation (or be totally arbitrary and capricious). And its up to the market to replace twitter/FB.
- A monopolistic social media website is part of the public square. So facebook is more like the US federal government than it is like the burger shop down the road. As such, facebook/twitter should be held to the norms of a government, not the norms of a business. They should allow free speech by the participants in that space, in accordance with the laws of the land. The market should be free to work inside twitter/fb.
Both of these stories are internally consistent, and both stories are consistent with the broad ideas of "free speech" and "free markets".
You need an actual free market which does not exist. Other than that I dont care facebook is moderating its own platform.
This is a bit of a blanket ad hominem - these are not necessarily the same groups of people even if they occasionally share the same message.
Even with ultra-conservative circles, there has always been some unpopularity with the party line on economic issues. Free trade, education, etc.
speaking for myself, i’m not dumb and don’t think it’s illegal for them to stop free speech.
but i think we are allowed to be upset and criticize it or call for boycotts and condemn them. that’s our free speech.
just like if twitter banned any support of lgbt rights i’m sure the left would cry and not just dismiss it as “corporations aren’t held to the first amendment”
imo free speech is a human right and corporations shouldn’t oppress it even if they legally can. just like they shouldn’t discriminate even if they legally could
And everyone else can exercise their freedom of speech by calling out the flaws logical inconsistencies in your criticisms of the content moderation.
> imo free speech is a human right and corporations shouldn’t oppress it even if they legally can. just like they shouldn’t discriminate even if they legally could
Private people and companies are under no obligation to offer their help and services to people who wish to use those services to organize killings or any other crimes. In fact, it's extremely common for businesses to have (and enforce) policies against such use of their products/services, since it's obviously not in their best interest to be viewed by the public as an accessory to crime.
The "stop the steal" and similar posts now being removed under the policy are intended for recruiting people to an upcoming armed escalation of last week's riot and invasion at the Capitol (using the false pretense of election fraud by Democrat officials). Their purpose is to capture or kill anyone standing in the way of their goal to overturn the election result, at some point before inauguration. This isn't conjecture; the posts and the commentary surrounding them have been out there for everyone to see. This was also noted by Twitter in their recent announcement on the suspension of the outgoing president's account.
you haven’t pointed out a logical inconsistency. please point out the inconsistency in my statements:
1. Companies are legally free to ban anyone they want. (in fact i side with right of the christian baker refusing to make cakes for gay weddings)
2. Companies shouldn’t ban people for their political opinions or restrict them from expressing them. It’s evil and immoral and horrifying behavior, but not illegal. if they do it, i will call it out as horrific. just like i think the baker shouldn’t discriminate against gay weddings even though they should legally be able to.
> imo free speech is a human right and corporations shouldn’t oppress it even if they legally can. just like they shouldn’t discriminate even if they legally could
Let's say I (or my company) hosted an online message board, and a thread was brought to my attention with messages like "We need to hunt down every last Democrat senator and put a bullet in their head!", with replies like "Amen! I'll bring my rifles" and "What time should we meet?".
You'd better believe I'd "oppress" such speech and ban the users, and you'd be severely hard-pressed to convince me that such a response is a human rights violation. Those messages, or whatever fabricated claims were used to justify the threats therein, don't constitute "political opinions" just because political parties and politicians are named. Likewise, outright false/fabricated claims that "the Democrats" fraudulently/secretly changed the result of the 2020 election are, in no way, "political opinions" -- rather, they are statements of (false) fact, meant to incite viewers to violence for the fabricator's gain.
For me to un-publish such posts from my web site cannot be considered discrimination against a political group; it's refusal to allow my servers to help conspirators commit a violent crime. If you want to brand something as "horrific" here, it should be the posts I described and not the take-downs.
Last night I tried takeout from a new restaurant in town. The food was awful, the food late, the order wrong and the prices way too high.
My hoped-for solution isn't for the government to step in and fix the problem. ("There oughta be a law!") It's for the company to be replaced by competitors with new and better products. (Or for the company itself to improve under competitive pressure.)
Most free marketers don't think the government should enforce all of their moral beliefs. You can be morally against an act of a private company and still believe they have the right to do it. If a company is behaving poorly, and we have a free market, there will probably be alternatives for people to take their business to.
Because Republicans really have moved to the center on economic issues. The ideological "movement" strain of conservatism no longer has much sway.
You no longer hear Republicans talk about Medicare or Social Security privatization, Obamacare repeal, Dodd-Frank repeal, etc because they've moderated on the free market idealism.
Is not the 'free market' when google/facebook have been propped up by US institutions like the CIA, NSA, and Stanford. Google and Facebook are as established as institutions as the US Army or Dept of Homeland Security and should be scrutinized as such.
"Free market" is theory, not reality. There are no 100% free markets, nor are there 100% controlled markets. The free market is an ideal that you strive towards in a capitalistic society.
Also, the question of "why are they allowed to be upset?" is pretty wild. Who are you to disallow someone getting upset about something?
Good point. We will have to wait and see how the rest of the world will judge Twitter, Facebook, AWS et al.
I suspect other countries and their citizens wouldn’t want American corporate interference. Free market forces will certainly cut down these corporate influence to size.
That’s my prediction. We will have to wait and watch. Time will tell.
>why are people who want the government to be replaced by the "free market" allowed to be upset that private companies are silencing them
Because there's a clear government-enforced bias. Can you imagine the shitshow if they banned, let's say, black people?
> Because there's a clear government-enforced bias.
Obvious lie. The current government is controlled by the group pushing the "stop the steal" propaganda. No reasonable person would believe Trump's own government is compelling Facebook to remove it.
> Can you imagine the shitshow if they banned, let's say, black people?
Sure... And what, pray tell, does that have to do with removing _posts_ containing calls to violence? How are those two things comparable?
Curious what would be your take if they banned people based on color. Is it still okay for a private company to set any rules?
Why do you keep raising hypotheticals which have nothing to do with reality? Once again, TFA is about removing _posts_, not people.
Nevertheless, I'll indulge you: While businesses in the USA generally reserve the right to refuse to do business with whomever they please, Federal law (under the Civil Rights Act of 1964) prohibits discrimination in public businesses made on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Many states also have their own laws further limiting discrimination, though I'm not personally that aware of how these have been tested in regard to online services serving many states/countries.
Beyond what's required under law, companies can have whatever policies they wish (but will have to deal with public outrage for implementing policies as disgusting as the one given in your example).
I mostly doubt that without the underlying current system companies will act the same way. In this case, I doubt they'd all have as much of a push to ban the same people at the same time example.
Why are people who want to play soccer allowed to be upset when the opponent scored a goal?
I don’t know how to answer your question outside of anology. It’s possible to want one thing and not another.
One can be upset at a corporation and not believe the correct solution is government intervention.
Because the current trend of private companies engaging in censorship is not really "voluntary" private action. A large contingent of the people pushing for censorship will not take no for an answer. If the companies will not "voluntarily" censor their platforms the "right way" then they will use the newly elected government to make them censor their platforms and punish them for their willful efforts to shirk their "duty" in the name of evil. The wave of censorship going on right now is about as voluntary as paying your taxes.
That is not to say that censorship is evil on its face. Like taxes, it serves an important purpose especially in private discourse. HN would not be as it is without the tireless efforts at moderation and censorship in the name of pruning out low quality discourse. To disallow all voluntary content discrimination or censorship is to lose direction. However, the key distinction is that the vast majority of the censorship on HN is not backstopped by the threat of government censorship to comply. If the calls for censorship stopped at the private sector and did not threaten the intervention of the government if they did not get what they wanted then I would have absolutely no problem with these private companies silencing individuals in much the same way I have no problem with HN banning people.
I suspect somebody will chime in saying that the censorship is now totally voluntary because they have realized just how bad the consequences of their existing policies are with the riots in the capital. To that I say, have you ever seen Zuckerberg talk about free speech [1]? Just look at 4:50 or so. 5:20, is literally a total refutation of the current arguments. At every step along this path he has spoken in favor of free speech and fought the calls for them to censor Facebook. As far as I can tell he is a true believer in the principles of free speech. There is no doubt in my mind that if he truly believed that the government would not intervene that he would not only not censor, he would immediately revert to their policies as of a few years ago with respect to censorship.
Really this argument seems to come from people saying that the 1st Amendment only applies to the government, so private censorship is totally fine. True, but are you really following the spirit of the 1st Amendment if you threaten government censorship? If people really thought the government would not censor, then they would assign zero credibility to the threat and ignore it. That people truly consider the threat is an indication that they feel it might actually be acted upon.
Also, I am not saying that government censorship is bad in all cases. There are cases where unlimited free speech may not be worth the consequences. However, such rules should always be carefully considered and we should not turn a blind eye to the fact that we are, in fact, using the government to stamp down on speech. It is with great regret that we should make such decisions since we can find no other alternative and we should acknowledge that we have engaged in evil to fight an even greater one.
Even (most) free market conservatives don't believe in the free market when there are too few competitors. This is why you have utility commissions setting electricity rates rather than allowing the free market to do it.
We have too few competitors to Facebook for the market to work right.
We have two coalition parties and it’s not the same people saying the same things: https://ibb.co/mbTycKP
For one thing, your argument is reductionist. Just because Republicans complain about how CNN chooses to run its newsroom doesn’t mean they want a government takeover of CNN. You can say that something private actors are doing is bad or risky without there being an implication that the government should stop that bad behavior.
I mean you can flip this around just as easily? Where are all the Fairness Doctrine liberals?
For the other: quite a few Republicans, especially the folks Trump brought in, are economically quite liberal. See: https://ibb.co/mbTycKP Trump took changes to social security and Medicare off the table during his campaign. The laissez-faire economic libertarian wing long held the advantage within the coalition, but a bunch of them have become Democrats over the last couple of decades, especially with the rise of Trump.
I mostly identify the Fairness Doctrine as a liberal canard, not a conservative one.
People are allowed to have any opinions they want, even ones that seem contradictory to you.
It's not a free market when a handful of companies can collude to shut out a competitor as they've done to Parler.
Parler is not a competitor to Amazon. They were a customer.
Forest for the trees, man.
They were a liability not a customer.
Sad to see this with the Adam Swartz post both on the front page. We need more powerful people who will voice, not for the proliferation of conspiracies, but for the right to speak ones mind on the internet. Even here on HN any attempt at putting forth the wrong opinion on the election will result in a ban. This will embolden and validate the opinions of Trump supporters. This morning, Angela Merkel voiced her own fears that censorship is going too far
Supposedly there are a lot of "really smart people" who are behind this censorship push. Certainly they have researchers at these companies who have studied human behavior and know the outcome? Certainly they know that suppressing people has an equal and opposite effect, fomenting further extremism and resistance?
So we're left with 3 potential realities: 1) the tech oligarchs are recklessly ignorant about what they're doing, 2) they're recklessly emotional about the situation and don't care about the fallout, or 3) their decisions are calculated and the push-back from the extremists is desired. All 3 are worrisome.
After the next wave of attacks, they probably don’t want to be blamed.
Similar to the FBI making a press release today about upcoming “protests”.
> Even here on HN any attempt at putting forth the wrong opinion on the election will result in a ban.
I haven't seen this, all the bans I have seen are the result of ideological warfare and flamebait.
However you will get downvoted to -4 for questioning the integrity of the election. So don't do that ;)
You think you don’t have a voice, I cannot even downvote
you have to earn it by accumulating a certain karma though contributions that are upvoted by the community. I can downvote but I can't downvote replies to me, and for some poorly understood reason, sometimes I just can't downvote even though I have not yet participated in the thread.
I am aware, but my contributions don’t merit enough karma, so I wander forever.
I'm sorry to hear that buddy.
> Even here on HN any attempt at putting forth the wrong opinion on the election will result in a ban.
Politics are off-topic on HN.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
They should also remove all containing "Communism is bad".
Along with this, it seems to me media should not be referring to the terrorists entering the Capitol as 'storming' as that is the terminology used by the fringe groups of which they are proud of. I've read articles mentioning what these fringe groups call 'the storm' and I think distancing media reports from that is important.
Storming is just a term for what they did. It doesn't come from any particular movement.
There are some Neo-Nazi associations with the word Storm.
In Nazi Germany Sturmabteilung or "Storm Division" was the paramilitary division of the Nazi party until it was replaced by the SS on the Night of Long Knives.
Some Neo-Nazis have kept up the language.
Stormfront is a popular Neo-Nazi website.
The Daily Stormer is another.
I don't follow Neo-Nazism but I am sure there are others.
So calling the riot a "Storming" is suggestive that it is an organized assault by Neo-Nazis.
I suppose that takes "blitz" out of consideration.
I see your point, though.
Many words would have been valid substitutions. Each word choice has it's own associations and resonances.
Storming is a generic term for taking over a building by force.
I suggest we make individuals or organizations that spread lies without evidence liable on a civil or criminal basis.
The root reason for the violent riot at the Capitol last week was that many people have been lied to, and the lies are things that would incite people to fight. If you believed that America's democracy is no longer in place and has been replaced by a deep state dictatorship, you would probably fight against it yourself.
We must fight the beliefs at the source - stop the liars by making them liable for the damage they cause.
What mechanism would you propose to implement your suggestion? Some kind of Ministry of Truth, or Council of Honesty? Or maybe just run everything everyone says through a fact-checker app and if they fail, lock them up?
We have laws for actual harmful lies, such as falsely shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. But beyond that, it's a grey area, slippery slope, etc.
We already have a mechanism for harm from lies - libel and slander laws. Just expand these laws to make lying to the public about something that if they believe it could cause them harm a tort.
We have existing criminal and civil laws and courts of laws for this. The system is very sophisticated, though can certainly be improved.
You have to take each case on an individual basis, meet a standard of proof, follow strong processes, convince a jury, survive appeals, so it’s not easy.
But it can handle the grey areas that worry you. And while we’ve had ample opportunity, it doesn’t look like we’ve gone down a slippery slope.
The amount of people advocating for a literal Ministry of Truth is very disappointing. It's almost like they read 1984 and thought "hey, that's a good idea!". Although in reality I think they just don't realize the implications of their suggestions.
They think they'll be the ones running the ministry.
It is tough when the liar is the president and somehow the learned justices of our nation have decided the president is above the law and can only be held to account via an impeachment process.
Would you prefer a system where an unelected justice system has the right to remove the president?
You sound almost like you want to give these people a pass. People get lied to all the time. The vast majority of them don't respond by forming an unruly mob of slathering idiots.
Not grandparent poster, but what's the other option? If somehow we could give everyone god-esque knowledge and wisdom (e.g. make them able to be able to travel through time and space and check all those claims of voter frauds so they can deduce themselves, that, well, maybe there were fraudsters here and there, but not enough that it flipped the states from Trump to Biden; or to show them that no, there's no basement in some pizza parlor where the Democrat cabal are hiding Epstein and all the missing children), it would be great to be able to make the insurrectionists realize that they've been lied to.
A lot of the mob on 1/6 probably really thought they were taking back the country from some corrupt Deep State and that Trump was this great guy who tried to fix the world, but has ben thwarted (although, saying all the non-Christian and non-Whites are not entitled to live here is not defensible). Like the lady who was shot, if you check her Twitter, she really bought into the whole QAnon brainwashing.
wrong thought will not be tolerated and is to be actively censored.
boy, we've taken quite a turn from where we were just a few years ago with conspiracy theories spreading like wild fire regarding Trump and Russia.
it would probably be better to actively engage believers of "Stop the Steal" with facts about the election vs. removing content that they are creating.
a better idea - tell Trump he can have his Facebook back if he agrees to go on talk radio and cable news and tell his supporters that he was lying to them all along, there is no evidence of meaningful voter fraud, and it's time to move on. only when enough of the supporters are finally convinced of this can he have his account back (or 6 months, whichever is greater)
Seems to be a new account. Welcome to HN!
Anyway, why are you mixing up these two things?
- inciting violence at the Capitol
- claims of voter fraud.
He's been claiming voter fraud since before November 8th, and he didn't get banned then, so obviously that has nothing to do with it.
You have a valid point, but
> so obviously that has nothing to do with it
is very much taking it too far. It's clear the voter fraud is the primary motivation he is using to incite the riots, and for many of the rioters it is their moral basis underpinning their actions.
"All he has to do is say there are five lights"
it would be interesting to redo that episode, where there ARE actually 5 lights but picard keeps insisting their are 4 out of spite
Fwiw at the end of the episode Picard says to Riker: "You know, I really did see five lights".
At the end, wasn't the comment that he believed he _could_ see five lights?
It's possible this is a deliberate grammatical ambiguity, but I think it could also be read as "I was not just willing to say it, my reality was being destroyed".
PICARD: I, er, I don't know where to begin. It was...
TROI: I read your report.
PICARD: What I didn't put in the report was that at the end he gave me a choice between a life of comfort or more torture. All I had to do was to say that I could see five lights, when in fact, there were only four.
TROI: You didn't say it?
PICARD: No, no, but I was going to. I would have told him anything. Anything at all. But more than that, I believed that I could see five lights.
This almost makes me suspect that the Facebook executives behind this decision are secretly die hard pro-Trumpers.
Sure, it's definitely a bit spooky that people are going around saying the election was stolen when, as far as I can tell, there's no hard evidence of widespread cheating. (I'm open to changing my mind given sufficient evidence, I'm just saying that I haven't seen it yet.)
But this is the equivalent of Facebook saying "hmm, looks like there's a fire going on over there, better go and dump a barrel of oil on it to put it out". Of course people are going to notice that their posts are being deleted. And even if they didn't notice, Facebook is loudly and publicly announcing that they are removing those posts. This will naturally result in those people saying, "aha, this confirms that there is a liberal elite conspiracy against folks like me". It will only make them more certain that the election was stolen.
Honestly, I can't say I blame them for suspecting a conspiracy, given we've had similar moves by other tech companies. As a generally left wing person, what am I supposed to say? "Yeah, we know that all these social networks are acting all biased and stuff against people with your opinions, but it's not actually a conspiracy, just a bunch of people without the ability to predict what others will make of their actions all being idiots at the same time due to simple memetic contagion." I think that's actually what's going on, but I can definitely see how from the other side it looks like a conspiracy.
It might still have the desired effect if it stops this content from spreading. Sure, the people who post it get more pissed off, but a larger number who would’ve been exposed to it otherwise now won’t.
I don’t have any data to support any conclusion, just brainstorming.
The Soviet Union cracked down on typewriters but couldn’t stop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat. These people will undoubtedly find something similar. Actual suppression makes any conspiracy theory more credible.
I also don’t have any data, but I feel like these types of tactics don’t account for higher order effects of pushing people to more extreme platforms, and in general seem extremely short sighted.
It could be calculated to further inflame, radicalize and marginalize people.
do they make it country specific - ie. would the posts questioning the integrity of elections in another country, say Russia (not that i personally question it, Vova, mind you, just a hypothetical), be allowed?
Facebook has happily oppressed Palestinian protestors while turning a blind eye to 'calls by Israelis for the killing of Palestinians'.
http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2...
It is obvious now that big tech companies are deep players in political games.
Do you think they play on purpose? Or do they not think through the longer ramifications of their actions?
"Stop The Steal" is nowadays very specifically referring to the conspiracy theories surrounding the US November 2020 presidential election that was started by Trump supporters.
Maybe in a few years (months if you're optimist), it will be forgotten (because of these kinds of measure?) and the phrase will be allowed again.
This kind of behavior by facebook is only going to radicalize people and make them extremely suspicious of anyone that disagrees with them.
Do you think someone prone to conspiracy theories is going to start listening to people who are actively campaigning for the destruction/deletion of information. We need consensus and half of consensus means listening.
They're already radicalized. We listened to this claim for 2 months, the claim has been aired in court many, many times. We don't need to listen to it any more.
For more than a decade, we have seen how social networks let conspiracies and extremist views thrive and how they were amplified.
There is ample evidence that "listening" does not tame or squash these positions on these platforms.
But is there evidence that censoring conspiratorial opinions does anything other than strengthen them?
On other platforms they get orders of magnitude more interest because they were censored, and more people move to other platforms.
Like Naval says, if you stop the king, then you are THE KING.
The king is stopped through a nationwide election, independently conducted by each state, contested in 64 accounts of court and dismissed by the supreme court. So that makes the democratic process - the KING. Right?
When a handful of companies get to choose which candidates the people get to hear from, the choice is a sham.
Kind of, but noone voted on the official POTUS account being effectively banned.
Does this put them in the unenvious position to take down any up-to-then unproven allegations?
Does it mean any group seeking remedy against BigCorp with slogans like “Stop the Stink” to oppose a new dump can be shut down through lawyers if the group cannot prove their allegations?
Do groups of protesters who boycott companies invade the US capitol with the intent of overthrowing the government or undermining a democratic election?
This doesn't really seem comparable, does it?
Regardless, it proves that if something is not proven, they CAN. Why wouldn’t a company argue for this? Your platform is carrying lies, Remove now!
"Stop censoring the steal".
Note well: I do not believe that there was in fact a steal. But if Facebook wants to do this, they're going to find out that there are several ways to modify or paraphrase this, and they're going to have to block significantly more than one phrase.