[bitstan]

Google also runs an ISP. Do you want them to police which IP addresses "don't promote insurrection"? Seems like something a judge and jury should perform.. Democracy and all that..

Calling it now. The horseshoe theory is about to manifest in the most real way possible. Silicon Valley is going to clamp down on first amendment rights and vindicate the garbage insurrection we're seeing now. You'd think Americans would've learned something about blowback.

The social media platforms we use influence our democracy in a big way. The fact they can share ownership with hostile and non-democratic regimes is curious.

[ashtonkem]

Personal behavior can have consequences. If I get in the habit of abusing my neighbors and the local service staff, I might get banned from buying lattes along with the other adults.

This isn’t a complex concept. The idea that a company can continually host people planning an insurrection and not get shown the door by the free market is actually a radical idea.

[bitstan]

As I stated, the horseshoe is going to come full circle. Commence the sequence where burning books is a virtue.

[ashtonkem]

This isn’t burning books. This is getting banned by the local Starbucks for shouting slurs at the barista. It’s incredibly disingenuous to call this “burning books”.

And that’s before we cover the fact that you are arguing that the government should force private companies to associate with people based on their political affiliations. That sounds authoritarian to me.

[read_if_gay_]

It's also incredibly disingenious to equate the App Store with the local Starbucks.

[ashtonkem]

Starbucks probably has a larger share of the coffee market than Apple does of the computing market.

Either way, Apple selling a bunch of stuff gives you no right to access their equipment. Nor does it make giving the government the right to reach in and compel Apple to do business with people and entities they don’t want to. That’s authoritarian, and if you think that won’t be abused by a later administration, I’m not sure what you’ve been paying attention to for four years.

If you think Apples so big that they have too much influence, then what you need is antitrust law, not the first amendment.

[read_if_gay_]

> If you think Apples so big that they have too much influence, then what you need is antitrust law, not the first amendment.

I agree. I was just taking issue with your analogy because your app getting banned from App Store isn't comparable to getting banned from the local Starbucks. On multiple levels. Acting like it is is misrepresenting the issue.

[dragonwriter]

This isn't analogous to burning books, it's analogous to individual bookstore chains choosing not to stock your book. Or to individual publishers choosing not to publish your book.

No one is stopping you from self-publishing your manifestos and selling them out of the trunk of your car, metaphorically speaking.

Or literally, in Josh Hawley’s case.

[okaram]

Repeat after me ... first amendment starts with 'Congress shall pass no law' ... neither AWS or google are congress

[ashtonkem]

Trust me, people will continue to willfully and repeatedly misunderstand this, no matter how much you explain the first amendment.

[triceratops]

> Do you want them to police which IP addresses "don't promote insurrection"?

Should've thought of that before repealing net neutrality.

[newacct583]

Don't you see you're falling down the same rathole? Your language and imagery is... kinda violent. It's not an argument about principles, with nuance, you've got enemies. You're warning about "blowback". You're saying that the insurrection is "vindicated". You're implying that this action against Parler is a foreign conspiracy too.

Now... is that one post beyond what HN should allow? Probably not, and it's not my call, we'll see what dang says. But imagine a whole community of people like you warning constantly about imagined terrors and existential threats. And everyone gets to one-up each other.

That's what Parler is. Before long you get senior thought leaders like the President's former attorney (or whatever Lin Wood is) expressly calling for the Vice President to be executed to stop an imagined "steal" of the election. And then the mob attacks the VP and congress trying to do exactly that.

It has to be stopped somehow, right? We can't have online communities pushing real world violence. And it all starts with content moderation. The reason this seems so extreme is that it should have happened LONG ago.

[j8hn]

Interesting choice of words "imagined terrors and existential threats".

This is what Glen Greenwald was arguing that the left has been doing.

[newacct583]

Greenwald was outrageously wrong, though. It's clear the threat the left was imagining is real, we saw that on Wednesday.

[ashtonkem]

Greenwald is a crank who rage quit because his editors asked him to provide actual sources. I’m not sure why anyone listens to him anymore.

[mlyle]

I do worry about the consequences of Twitter, Reddit, et al banning the more marginal content, though.

When The_Donald was on reddit, it was more easily monitored in one place. People who used it at least were forced to confront evidence daily that they weren't holding the majority opinion. And grownups from the platform could remove (and report to LE) the worst stuff.

When you ban those people from mainstream platforms, you do deny them some of an audience. But you also encourage them to make their own echo chambers and congregate elsewhere, which may be on the balance worse.

Now we see the same things happening with Twitter / Parler and Gab.

It's definitely hard to know where to draw the line. Karl Popper and all that.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

FWIW, I've almost never seen this argument made by people who aren't secretly or openly supporting those who are banned (you being the exception here).

I believe there's quite a bit of data now that shows that deplatforming tends to work. I have forgotten all the names, but someone named "Milo" seems relevant, and wasn't Alex Jones also banned from somewhere and lost a lot of influence since?

And those are the cases where bans would tend to fail, i. e. people that had years to grow a loyal fan base, collect names & emails, etc. If it works in those cases, it should be extremely powerful when being used a bit more proactive. Anybody watching /r/thed... would have known it's toxic two weeks in, before it had time to spiral entirely out of control.

[mlyle]

I think that maybe, if you ban really early, you can interrupt some of the badness--- but this is also the time it's hardest to justify quelling speech.

But by the point they have a large community together, they'll go somewhere else and be worse. Better would be to constantly prune off the worst bits of the community that are most over the line rather than purging all at once (which guarantees a migration).

It's hard to disentangle what the exact causes are, but it sure seems like the discourse has gotten even worse over the past couple of years even as these types of deplatforming choices have been made.

e.g. thedonald.win is infinitely worse than /r/TheDonald was.

I do also worry a bit about a few powerful parties becoming intermediaries to communication (Twitter, Facebook) and imposing their own standards, too. Right now the choices being made are relatively benign, but will they always be?

Once you have an isolated pile of mostly violent extremists with no content control-- go ahead and censor away, though.

[bitstan]

FWIW I only discovered reddit because I was "deplatformed" from Digg due to sharing the image below.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...

Can't be the only one. Reddit was a libertarian cesspool at the time, a crime for sure. RIP Mr.Swartz <3

[bitstan]

> It has to be stopped somehow, right? We can't have online communities pushing real world violence.

Seems like a function of a democratic government, not Jeff Bezos. Because Jeff Bezos isn't the government. Well, maybe, but not officially right?

What more could the FBI want than to have every extremist in the country communicating from one centralized server on AWS? Sad. Now they'll probably adopt a secure decentralized communication strategy and form into cells that can't easily be tracked.. wait, this happened before didn't it

[abernard1]

The fact that you think his post is violent and want to tattle to the moderator is all I need to be afraid of censorship.

Every bit of his comment is a valid concern and Matt Taibbi had a similar and sadly predictive post about this a few weeks ago on this subject [1].

[1] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-youtube-ban-is-un-american...