They also prevent sending links to known phishing sites. They prevent the spread of malware.
Yes, this Trump-idiocy is malware.
Yes, this oversight needs oversight in the open. A list of banned stuff, with explanation.
Also, not surprisingly alternative platforms quickly sprung up to serve that audience and host. Though they might eventually get kicked off Cloudflare, and so on.
HN is fairly equivocal on the concept of walled gardens as a safety measure, despite the lack of accountability. There's some consensus that it's perfectly fine for e.g. Apple to prevent you from installing something outside the app store, or to put up major hurdles to installing anything unsigned on MacOS, because Grandma and Grandpa can't be trusted not to do something silly and get pwned. "It's not a hacker device!" is the usual refrain.
Yet the consequences of having your brain be pwned are so much worse. There are people who believe the Earth is flat and that vaccines cause autism; some of these beliefs can cost lives. Maybe YouTube shouldn't be a "hacker platform" either, but a place where people can watch videos without fear of being led down a rabbit hole.
At some point you have to trust adults and allow them to make mistakes. I get protecting children from bad information but adults should be trusted with their own lives. We should trust them to have a basic level of comprehension and logic by a certain age. If they don’t we need to revamp the education system, not cater to the lowest common denominator.
It's the same problem as the "both sides" approach to anything [0] ("my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge").
This inherently just moves the problem to decide who's informed (or equivalently what's the required level of "informedness").
Many jurisdictions routinely suspend people's voting rights. Due process and all. Of course when it comes to giving them back after they've served their sentence the process somehow slows down. So I'm fully aware of the downsides of this.
I'm not advocating for doing that to any concrete group of people, I'm advocating for working on this problem. It's not the first time this has come up in history, nor the last.
The long term solution is education. Yes. Is there even a short-term solution? Maybe not. However I'm interested in the details of best arguments for and against.
And I'm not convinced at all that just because someone is older than X years they now have to be "trusted". After all we should protect elderly people from bad information too, they seem to live their second childhood.
> They're private platforms. You can send those links via many other routes ...
That is a complete non sequitur. You say it's not about freedom of speech. Someone responds that, in fact, blatant censorship is occurring. You don't even attempt to refute this point, instead falling back to pointing out that the censorship isn't illegal!
Censorship reduces freedom to speak. That statement remains true whether or not the speech happens to be legally protected, and regardless of how wide spread the censorship might be.
Removing spam could be considered a form of censorship. It is removing the speech of others.
Generally anti-spam measures facilitate rather than inhibit freedom of speech. A sufficiently popular internet forum without spam controls would quickly become mostly unusable.
In this case, doesn't censorship enable freedom to speak?
These aren't singular global quantities. Such censorship reduces spammers' freedom to speak in order to preserve that of the other participants. Spamming closely resembles a tragedy of the commons (overuse of the system to solicit sales) and anti-spam an associated regulatory action.
The problem with such an analogy is that spam is inherently off topic - approximately none of the other participants actually want to see it. That's fundamentally different from this case. Whether you deem it misinformation or political speech, many of the participants clearly do want to see it. In fact, they want to see it so much that such information is consistently selected by the automated algorithms that are designed specifically to maximize engagement metrics.
We should be careful not to conflate wanting to see something with clicks. By that metric, spam about free bitcoins has more interested participants than much of the political speech in question.
It's not a non sequitur. Freedom of speech is not the same thing as a (nonexistent) right to post whatever you want on a private platform regardless of the consequences for others or for the platform itself.
I never said it's not censorship. You can post links on a number of competing services (or start your own), therefore statements like
“A group of unknown people at a technology corporation should be the ultimate authority on what I’m allowed to say, read, or share with my friends.”
> Freedom of speech is not the same thing as a (nonexistent) right to post whatever you want on a private platform
Again with a non sequitur - I never claimed that it was. I said:
> > Censorship reduces freedom to speak. That statement remains true whether or not the speech happens to be legally protected
It's really hard to have a good faith discussion about the pros and cons of a nuanced issue when one of the parties repeatedly fails to make good faith interpretations of claims which appear to challenge their worldview.
Don't worry, you're free to speak your mind so long as you don't actually try to communicate with anyone. Please take care not to express your opinions outside of the officially designated free speech zones!
Don't be ridiculous. There are thousands of competing communications providers. If you want to share content that harms society or harms the platforms themselves then you might just have to do it outside of Facebook or Twitter.
Yes, this Trump-idiocy is malware.
Yes, this oversight needs oversight in the open. A list of banned stuff, with explanation.
Also, not surprisingly alternative platforms quickly sprung up to serve that audience and host. Though they might eventually get kicked off Cloudflare, and so on.