There’s a difference between a state actor controlling the whole of the public arena and a private individual controlling their own privately-sponsored forum; the latter allows you to crack open a blog and flog whatever opinion you want, and the former does not. I admit there’s some gray area for something like google, which by virtue of its size and role as intermediary has censorship abilities approaching governmental levels.
Freedom of Speech is a restriction on the government, not a duty on the part of private individuals to let you come in and piss on their living room carpet.
This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship. The law doesn't protect this kind of speech, which means they are legally permitted to participate in censorship, but it is censorship all the same. Yours is a common and poor argument for justifying this behavior. There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral. I would prefer to participate in a transparently moderated community where the rules are clearly defined and aren't selectively enforced. This makes for a better community.
They don't have a legal obligation to behave this way, but that needs to stop being used as an excuse to shut down discussions on how to make the community better.
This ends up being a debate about word choice, and I normally hate that. But there is good reason to distinguish the two carefully, and the easiest way to do that is word choice.
I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still talk on thousands of other places.
I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.
>I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still talk on thousands of other places.
I would argue that this is definitely censorship. Just because you can go somewhere else doesn't mean you aren't being censored - you are being denied access to the HN audience. Somewhere else isn't going to have the same audience. And that audience isn't making the decision - a small number of moderators are. But you're right that this is just down to pedantic word choice, feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not push the matter further.
>I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.
I'm not here touting free speech like it's a legal right I have as a submitter and an obligation HN has as a publisher. Instead I'm touting it as a damn good idea that makes for a better medium for discussion and suggeting HN embraces it anyway.
> feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not push the matter further
Think you're right. You completely ignored my point, so this is pointless. But the root issue is not different than, either through ignorance or deceptive calculation, claiming that copyright infringement is theft. It is a category error that negatively effects people's understanding of what's going on, so it matters.
> This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship
It's not about justifications, it's about prerogatives.
> There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral.
Despite what you seem to be implying, the operators of a privately run forum have no moral obligation to let anyone speak, regardless of how that might impact the quality of discussion in the community. It is totally fair for participants to criticize the moderation efforts, but just because the site is high profile doesn't mean that the moderators are any more morally obligated to permit comment than you are morally obligated to amend your fine article with my commentary.
You seem to believe that it is a moral obligation of anyone with an audience/platform to provide that platform to anyone that wants to use it...? Specifically, you described “depriving (someone of an) audience” as the immoral act.
Just to recontextualize that: if I have a blog, am I immoral for not allowing comments? Am I immoral for not allowing guest bloggers? Do I have a moral obligation to allow advertisement?
This is odd. A moral obligation to use one’s private resources to provide an audience to all comers isn’t free speech; it’s not even a free marketplace of ideas. It’s appropriating someone else’s communications infrastructure.
I think a blog is a different enough medium that it renders the comparison meaningless. Hacker News is a website that posts user submissions. I wouldn't make this argument about your blog, but I might make it about Medium.
No, I would argue that it's different. CNN has a limited amount of time to fill and doesn't accept user submissions. HN has neither constraint, and gives users voting rights over some of the success of each post.
So are you suggesting that if I (the grandchild of Holocaust survivors) ran a link aggregator site, I would have a moral obligation to let self-declared Nazis who want to exterminate people of my ethnicity use it as a platform to speak about their hatred of people like me?
Or that a rape survivor has an obligation to allow someone to post on their site that there's no such thing as rape and every woman is "asking for it"?
No, and that's not what I'm asking of HN. I like communities that:
- Have well defined rules
- Enforce them equally
- Moderate transaprently
That's it. I'm not asking for an unfettered platform for free speech. If one of your rules is "no hateful posts targetting specific people or people groups", then it's a well justified decision to remove that post.
OK.... so if I enforce "no hateful posts targetting specific people or people groups", I have to ban the person who posts "the KKK are awful people and I think we should jail them" as I do someone who posts "people with dark skin are awful people and I think we should burn them"?
I'm somewhere between you and the parent. So much of the public square, figuratively speaking, is owned by private companies today. It's good to understand what the parameters are so you can know to what extent free expression and the free flow of ideas is occurring in a particular venue. Personally, I'm wary of just about any form of censorship, but I recognize it's a continuum, and not even I have my settings at 0.
I think this is a silly comparison. The HN curation isn't done to further some sort of agenda (at least, not at its surface or in some obvious fashion). It's to make sure we have higher quality content, not to sway the users' perspective in favor of some hidden cabal.
It isn't silly, it's an exact comparison to Newspeak, which is what the OP was doing. I mean, it's clear as day: the OP didn't even attempt to argue that censorship isn't happening. They just wanted to change the word describing it to make it feel less like oppression and more like helpfulness.
Don't get caught up in the comparison to a fascist regime. Plenty of left-wing socially conscious movements use this same tactic. I think everyone does this, usually unconsciously.
Is this definiton of censorship from Wikipedia incorrect then?
"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions"
No. But a thing being "censorship" does not imply that it is bad, unless further context is considered. However, when censorship is a good thing, we usually give it a different name because "censorship" bears a negative connotation.
As a basic example, parents frequently censor their children, but we call that "childrearing". Managers censor their workers, but some of that is necessary to run a company.
That's not the point. They just don't want to think censorship is an accepted part of their daily lives because censorship often implies oppression. But censorship is part and parcel of almost every forum. The social values of the people who own the forum, as well as incentives behind their operating it, determine what kind of censorship is applied.
For example, on YouTube, hate speech [which I know isn't actually a thing] is commonplace - they don't feel the need (or perhaps don't have the resources) to censor comments which certain people find detestable. But they have created complex systems to analyze videos so that they can identify certain ones and remove them automatically. The end result is that censorship isn't applied uniformly. In one example, a YouTube account that was documenting videos of attacks on the people of Raqqa was flagged for spreading terrorist propaganda. You could make the argument that while the hate speech didn't impact their bottom line, the videos could, so they accept a certain amount of unequal and unintentional censorship in order to maintain their business position, defend their corporate values, and of course, retain their user base.
Moderation is a more nuanced and human approach to censorship. By giving people second chances, answering emails, giving the occasional explanation, etc they build social capital and prevent emotional backlash that could threaten the status of the forum. By helping users to understand the error of their ways and have a chance to redeem themselves, they can't be accused of unfair treatment. But they are indeed imposing specific social and political values on their users, to the point of hiding or removing the post or user when it doesn't align with their values. This shapes not only the quality of the dialogue, but its content. This is the essence of censorship.
To severely paraphrase 1984: "To control speech you control language, as controlling language controls thought."
"By helping users to understand the error of their ways and have a chance to redeem themselves"
Could you elaborate a bit more on this part? I find your post quite insightful and well thought out as a whole (though my sarcasm detectors may be a bit off especially when it comes to the above sentence), but in any case, I'm not sure why you wrote "that's not the point" when everything you say seems to support exactly that point.
If you think of moderation as a tool to shape the flow of discussion in a certain pre-approved way (without, say "malicious" intent, though that can always become debatable from someone's point of view), when does moderation become censorship, or more specifically - at which point are the users allowed to think that the moderation actually became censorship? I mean, who sets the criteria? The moderator?
I was trying to convey that they weren't disagreeing with you about it being censorship, they were disagreeing of whether it was wrong or not depending on context. My reply was probably a bit disjointed.
A moderator is supposed to be an arbitrator or mediator. Moderation becomes censorship when they start enforcing policies to get users to align with their values rather than simply bringing people to an accord. Users are allowed to think it's censorship once they lose their value or become a liability.
> Users are allowed to think it's censorship once they lose their value or become a liability.
To someone who happened to live under a de facto Soviet occupation (not de jure, after all it was just a "requested friendly intervention with the noble intent of suppressing the rising nation-wide anti-people criminal elements, that just kind of somehow happened to last for a few decades"), this kind of wording (and the associated themes) sound indeed very familiar.
But it's interesting to see how many HN users don't see this as troubling at all, at least judging by the dozen (-s?) of downvotes that my original comment earned me since posting, not even mentioning how quickly other people that somehow dared to draw a parallel between censorship and the other, friendly kind of censorship got quickly downvoted into white five minutes from posting.
There's a practical difference between optimizing for content quality with honest and well-known criteria. And, optimization to prevent people to subject the party-line to criticism.
Unless you have examples where it has been the case, that's an unfair comparison.
> There's a practical difference between optimizing for content quality with honest and well-known criteria. And, optimization to prevent people to subject the party-line to criticism.
Well, yes. I really appreciate what dang & the rest of the moderators do in order to remove spam & optimise for quality — yet at the same time I really dislike a large number of the instances I've seen where they've exercised control to protect the party line from criticism (e.g. detaching subthreads or posting 'please don't argue X; we don't accept that here'). My perception (which of course is subjective, subject to confirmation bias & could be wrong) is that the vast majority of those instances I've seen have been egregiously wrong.
I've noticed fewer instances recently, perhaps because the moderators have been silently moderating or perhaps because they've actually refrained from exercising so heavy a hand.
Like I said, I approve of the good they do with respect to quality, but I actively disapprove of the censorship they have committed. Instances of the former greatly outweigh instances of the latter, but one instance of censorship is too many (it is, of course, Y Combinator's site to do with as they will).
Freedom of Speech is a restriction on the government, not a duty on the part of private individuals to let you come in and piss on their living room carpet.