[Closi]

> This is a specious argument on its face. The First Amendment does not say that private companies are obligated to spend money broadcasting someone else's speech. Hosting and serving isn't free and any private company has the freedom to decide what not to host.

I'm in the UK, but the difference is that right now, these private companies control communication.

I'm not allowed outside my house and I live alone. I'm not even allowed outside to go and talk to friends - people are getting fined and arrested for just sitting on a park bench because of the latest lockdown. All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies. If they lock me out, I'm totally screwed. What is free speech if I can't talk to anyone? Are the phone companies allowed to lock me out if they don't like what I'm saying?

So one could argue, that actually if we want free speech in the 21st century, and want to honour the intent of what it means to have free speech, there does need to be some protection here.

The protections around freedom of speech were put in at a time where it was inconceivable that a huge majority of worldwide speech could be mass-monitored and auto-censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said - and I think the legislators would have been horrified!

[epistasis]

If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square.

Have they shut down text messaging, phone calls, group messaging, all the encrypted messaging apps?

Do the tech companies control postal mail, letters to the editor, and printing presses?

Of course not. You are looking for others to give you a platform to reach a wide audience. There are many. But no platform requires people to publish you. You have lost being able to yell in a public square, temporarily, due to public safety, but you haven't lost the ability to transmit speech that would have been acceptable in the public square.

So so so tired of these false equivalencies, and an unwillingness to engage with the type of speech that results in this. Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no.

Hell, AWS still hosts the publication that posted Bezos' dick pics! These shutdowns are not some sort of political censorship, these shutdowns are the natural result of speech that societies have determined not to be free.

[plutonorm]

All well and good. But say for instance you lived in nazi Germany, would you have the right to protest? Would you have the right to say things that are outside of the overton window? You would not have the right, and your opinions would be spat upon. And yet they would be true and right for you. In your mind you would have every right to express yourself and undermine the government outside of democratic means.

The point is we can never know how far outside of what is "good" we currently circle. It is right that people with a belief strong enough to force them to action are forced to action. It is right that a state that believes itself true defends itself. It is all part of the process, all of it. Who the hell are you to know with certainty that you, specifically you, have the the eagle eyed vision to discern right from wrong? To somehow miraculously step outside of the tiny little context in which you live and know with 100% certainty that you are right.

You are the product of your surroundings, a container for thoughts passing through, a ghost in the machine. Don't be so God damned arrogant. You cannot know truth, you cannot know right. The world is unfolding as it should.

[avianlyric]

What exactly is your point, other than ad-hominem attacks?

OP made no claims to know that “good” is other than

> Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no.

Struggling to see a world that would consider incitements to violence as a “good” thing. I mean sure it’s possible, but so far away from our reality as to be entirely pointless as a basis for argument.

> nazi Germany, would you have the right to protest? Would you have the right to say things that are outside of the overton window? You would not have the right, and your opinions would be spat upon.

What does Nazi Germany have to do with any of this? That was a government suppressing a minority population and invading Europe. Your not suggesting that AWS is about to attempt the same thing?

> It is right that people with a belief strong enough to force them to action are forced to action

Glad we agree that people at AWS who have a strong belief to drop Parler are allowed to act on those beliefs.

> The world is unfolding as it should.

Then what’s your problem? Are you saying that AWS deplatforming Parler is preventing the world from unfolding as it should?

[plutonorm]

> Then what’s your problem? Are you saying that AWS deplatforming Parler is preventing the world from unfolding as it should?

I'm annoyed with the histrionics. Making arguments from places of moral outrage. Of extreme emotion. Each looking at the other with righteous indignation. Unable to see that what they feel is what the other side is feeling. What is needed at a time like this is for people to step outside of themselves. To understand that they do not know everything, that there is more than one way to think and to live. To be humble. When their amygdala screams that the other is dangerous, that the other is alien and dark and inhuman... To breathe, to understand their own weaknesses and move forward from a place of humility.

[lolc]

Please, spare us the accusations of arrogance. If you think our interpretations are dubious, tell us why!

[epistasis]

Oh come on, this is a not very old debate, and within living memory of many of us we actually had to fight against the Nazis and then determine how best to prevent fascism from taking hold. This is the basic debate about government. This is why any technologist who hopes to influence the world should read deeply of history and the prior debates along these same lines.

The clearest guideline that I have seen is the Paradox of Tolerance, where we must stop some speech in order to make room for as many as possible. Fascists hate this, because fascists are the ones who demand total and perfect freedom to act and speak as the wish, up to the point of being allowed to perform violence on those whose speech they don't like. Which is why the fascists were chanting "Hang Pence" as they stormed the capitol.

Don't you dare try to accuse me of being arrogant for judging fascists, and don't you dare accuse me of trying to be the ultimate arbiter of good and evil. I can name fascists as unacceptable to society without being an ultimate arbiter.

We are in dangerous waters in the US, and all our words mean something right now. Will we fall for the lies of the fascists who say "let us violate all social norms with our speech, and we promise we woke take over with violence than force you to follow our norms with violence," or will we stand up to them and enable as open a society as we can?

[plutonorm]

So the slave holders who were all adamant that owning slaves was cool, they were totally right to not question their own views? They believed they were right. You believe you are right. Create a logical argument for me describing how you just know you are right.

[epistasis]

You seem to be asking me to jump through some hoops to distinguish what I posted from justification of slavery. Also, as best as I can guess, you are advocating for nihilism.

How "logical" is it to say that because I have some values, they are indistinguishable from justifying slavery?

This sort of "there is no truth or good or bad" is exactly the sort of reasoning that's used to brainwash people into supporting anything and everything. Because once there's nothing true, there's nothing false.

If somebody is feeding you this line of reasoning, or some group, or some forum, I would recommend trying to reconnect with mainstream human thought and value of human life for a bit, and see if the nihilism still seems logical. Try to read a mainstream history of the Nuremberg trials, for example. Or read a book about the Reconstruction and the oppression that happened even after slavery was abolished.

[plutonorm]

I've held a position of cautious moral relativism since my early teens because I think carefully and try not to be reactive.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "The clearest guideline that I have seen is the Paradox of Tolerance"

It never ceases to surprise me that people wave around the Paradox of Tolerance as if were an immutable law of physics rather than merely one philosopher's opinion among many.

[epistasis]

Which people would be doing that? Since you quoted my "clearest guideline" text, are you misinterpreting that as "an immutable law of physics"?

It seems that if you can't deal with what was stated and have to fabricate positions in order to argue against, that you are not posting in good faith.

[ThrowawayR2]

Why would anyone quote or expect others to follow a guideline if they didn't believe it was true? Please provide a counterargument instead of using thought terminating clichés[0] like "not in good faith".

[0] Sorry for the jargon but there isn't a better term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

[junon]

> If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square.

That's some Grade A corporate apologetics there. How can you assert this? Who decides what is going to get you "shut down in the public square"?

[epistasis]

Who determines what speech gets shut down in the public square? In the US, it's a mixture of courts and legislation setting laws and their interpretations, lawsuits establishing damages for certain types of speech, and then of course cops on the ground making individual decisions on a case by case basis and using violence or threat of violence to arrest people.

I am not sure how any of this is apologizing for corporations instead of any other aspect of our system though...

Edit: For the lawsuit aspect of shutting down speech, check out this very topical lawsuit: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/11/cybersecu...

Even if this particular suit fails, I hope that it demonstrates that there are entire bodies of law set up to silence some forms of speech.

[unholiness]

> Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no

Right. Even the Post Office is not required to deliver pipe bombs.

The issue is that right now, that's not the standard. Amazon /hasn't/ taken down sites in the name of political censorship, but it /could/. The implications of that are important, and they're why I find it hard to be satisfied with justifications like "Amazon is a private company, they can do what they want".

[tsm_sf]

This is what everyone decided they wanted twenty years ago. Loss of public space was a huge topic of conversation, and the end consensus (IMHO) was that the internet itself was the public space and everyone was free to make something.

From that perspective this looks like a conversation about ease of access rather than free speech. Amazon's the only way to build something on Amazon, but nothing's stopping me from creating something myself.

I don't see being able to buy eyeballs on the cheap as a fundamental right. If you care enough, build it. If others care, they'll come.

[epistasis]

Right now, the US military could side with Trump, launch a fascist coup, start rounding up enemy politicians for assassination, and eliminate any freedom at all for anybody who doesn't who enough MAGA support publicly. They haven't, but they could, and it's happened frequently enough in other countries.

Not only is this scenario 1000x worse for freedom than the very very worst that Amazon could do, it's also far more likely at the moment.

So my question is, why the F are we even talking about Amazon? Because it's just a BS distraction from the elephant in the room.

It's time to stop engaging with sophistry and fight back the fascists that are trying to take away all our freedoms. And this big fear of big tech is exactly the type of distraction that lets fascism flourish enough to gain a stronghold.

[happythomist]

> Not only is this scenario 1000x worse for freedom than the very very worst that Amazon could do, it's also far more likely at the moment.

Politically motivated refusal of service by Amazon or other Silicon Valley firms is at least an order of magnitude more likely than any coup by the US military, much less a Trumpist one.

[epistasis]

Preposterous, the ranks of Q anon and MAGA are filled with ex-military and law enforcement. They flashed their badges at the Capitol police force! We are that close!

Meanwhile, this political shutdown is pure theory, a straw man floated to distract us from the violence that seethes on the platforms used to organize a fascist overthrow of the government.

But even if we take your probability assessment, the damage times the probability places a violent military coup as a HUGE problem compared to Amazon stopping business with someone.

[jessaustin]

Wow, maybe all that "defund the police" stuff was right?

[lovecg]

I’m curious what was your estimate of the likelihood of what happened last Wednesday before it happened? Were your priors updated in any way since then?

[NateEag]

I can't speak for OP, but long before the election, I was expecting violence around the US if Trump lost.

I didn't predict an attack on the Capitol, but it didn't really surprise me, either.

I speak as a conservative who is aggressively anti-Trump but believes many of his voters would not condone what happened at the Capitol.

[blitz_skull]

I'm pretty sure violent rhetoric is an entire ocean apart from mailing literal bombs..

Or are we still on that "words are violence" thing? I can't keep up.

[sn_master]

If you're so tired by the incitement of violence, what do you think about what BLM did last year?

[StanislavPetrov]

>If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square.

That's completely absurd. Tens of thousands of people are silenced by corporations every day for speech that is considered offensive by one metric or another, but is by no means illegal. An associate of mine was permanently banned for, "deadnaming" someone else. Certainly very offensive according certain standards but hardly something that you wouldn't be allowed to say in the public park.

You can reasonably argue about the right of private corporations to choose to do business with who they want, but you cannot reasonably argue that people are only being silenced for explicitly illegal behavior that would also be illegal offline.

[StanislavPetrov]

The delusion and mania gripping the country is evident by the downvotes to the above post. It is beyond dispute that the standards used by tech companies to silence people go far beyond speech that violates the law. Reading the TOS of any of these tech companies will confirm this. Its rather astounding that otherwise intelligent and presumably literate people are so jarred by this statement of indisputable fact. Unfortunately its impossible to have a thoughtful, reasoned discussion about the free speech issues raised by recent events when so many are living in denial of reality.

[epistasis]

There's two different sorts of "you" here. There's the big platform of "you" that AWS shut down, that was shut down for the not-allowed-in-public-sphere speech.

Then there are the "you"s that are posting on individual platforms that get to choose their own standards of conduct. AWS stopped business with a platform that would not be allowed in the public square.

An individual that got banned for dead naming can just start another account anonymously, as far as I know.

[vkou]

If I get banned from HN for violating it's ToS (By, say, personally attacking people, or posting links to pornography, or just engaging in insane off-topic ramblings), can I also describe that as being silenced for my beliefs? Despite retaining access to hundreds of unmoderated channels by which I can communicate?

[StanislavPetrov]

>If I get banned from HN for violating it's ToS (By, say, personally attacking people, or posting links to pornography, or just engaging in insane off-topic ramblings), can I also describe that as being silenced for my beliefs?

That's completely unrelated to the issue at hand - whether or not you'd be able to ramble insanely or make personal attacks in a public park (you would).

[munificent]

> these private companies control communication.

I think verbs are important. Another way to say this is that these companies enable or provide communication.

Imagine that COVID-19 had hit in the 80s before we had all of this. It would have been miserable, isolating, tragic. But would it make sense to blame the tech companies we have now for not existing then? Would it have been someone's fault?

> All my communication with everyone I know is done via private companies.

Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication.

That, of course, doesn't mean they are free from moral consequences or anything. But we are only beholden to them because they are providing us so much value.

> The protections around freedom of speech were put in at a time where it was inconceivable that a huge majority of worldwide speech could be mass-monitored and auto-censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said

It was also authored in a time where "broadcasting" meant literally printing copies of pamphlets and physically depositing them in every town square you wanted to reach.

I don't know if we have any clue how the Founding Fathers of the US would have interpreted today's communication systems. I think we need principles that are designed for the structures we do have without necessarily assuming any at-the-time-excellent principle from the 1700s must be directly mapped to today's needs.

[Closi]

“Control communication” is intentional - Content is scanned to understand intent, promoted/demoted based on an invisible algorithm, and your communication can be labelled or shut down if you have a dissenting opinion. In-between your conversation political adverts are inserted, specifically tailored to your demographic data and personality profile (and rather than encouraging you to vote for the party, they are actually designed to disenfranchise you and make you not vote for anyone).

This isn’t a future dystopia - this all already happens on Facebook. And that’s why this involves a level of control over being a neutral communication channel.

> Another way to frame that is just to be thankful that those companies are there to enable that communication.

Yes be thankful to mega corp. mega corp good. Mega corp has our interests at its heart.

[crazydoggers]

The difference with the phone companies is you’re talking one on one communication. Not a publishing platform which is what these social media services really are. You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group.

These are the same kinds of issues society dealt with, with the advent of radio and television, platforms that allowed small groups to reach out to very large groups of people with minimal effort.

Most countries have something like the FCC that regulates those platforms. Not only is it not permitted to incite violence in tv, even gross displays of real violence are censored, and even offensive speech. (For instance swearing).

Now we can have debates about the degree of that censorship, but the topics of free speech and first amendment rights have largely been settled.

If companies don’t self censor stuff that clearly 99% of society doesn’t like, then you’re going to see someone like the FCC or other government agencies step in. So what would you rather.

If someone like Parler or Gab wants to exists, they are free to at the moment, and they are also free to speak anything they want to whom ever they want. They just don’t get to force other people to support them in the process.

Coming from a family who’s relatives escaped from places which had true censorship, lack of any first amendment rights, the entitlement, and disconnect from reality in these arguments bothers me.

You do not have a protected right to a mass publication forum. That is not a first amendment right. You do have the right to establish such a platform if you wish to. But just like you had to buy you’re own printing press, you’ll have to buy your own internet infrastructure. And I and other groups of citizens (including companies made up of those citizens) also have a right not to listen to you and to throw your pamphlets in the trash.

And as a society, we have a right to limit free speech when it is very clearly only about hate and violence. You don’t get to call my house and tell me you’ll kill me for instance.

“ Under state criminal codes, which vary by state, it is an offense to knowingly utter or convey a threat to cause death or bodily harm to any person. It is also an offense to threaten to burn, destroy or damage property or threaten to kill, poison or injure an animal or bird that belongs to a person.”

[a_band]

> You can always use text, signal, etc if you want to communicate with your group.

Does Signal run on AWS? If I can shut you down at the cloud level then I'm not sure these options will be available in the future. Someone is going to coordinate a protest/riot on Signal, screenshots will leak, then what happens?

[crazydoggers]

Well Signal is free and open source. So feel free to boot up some servers on any other platform, or your own hosting and run it from there. Maybe signal the foundation needs to pay more or move platforms to support the app and make it easy to install, but again, why would or should AWS, Google, Apple be forced to host them? Don't those companies have a first amendment right to block speech they don't like?

It's like walking into the mall or public place, and saying, "You have to broadcast this message to everyone because 'freedom of speech'"".

In fact it's better to assume that private companies have such ability anywhere in the world. Signal fosters more access to defy censorship precisely because it realizes that. Making the software open source is how you allow people who need such tools to have them available.

And honestly... you've got the airwaves. It's called radio. Shortwave, can reach halfway around the world.

Again, the entitlement to these services astounds me. The internet didn't exist 40 years ago.... and now somehow the ability to assault people with misinformation, provide unfettered access for propaganda from state actors, permit the dissemination of hate speech is being called a right??

It makes no sense, and is completely devoid of historical perspective.

[a_band]

Like it or not private companies currently have a monopoly on the communication infrastructure of our planet. There is no "public option" for AWS. If they have a monopoly (which Apple and Google clearly have on the app store), then it comes with specific obligations to not discriminate and a requirement to provide services to everyone equally. That's the price you pay for banning competition from the market.

If Apple and Google allowed alternative app stores in their ecosystem, then there would be no problem with them kicking off any apps for any reason under the sun.

The argument is more nuanced for AWS as there are viable private competitors. However, it is stunning that they would cancel their contract with a customer by giving them only 24 hours notice. It's making me seriously consider why I would trust AWS as a partner.

[GrinningFool]

> censored by a few giant private companies that self-police what can and can't be said

But you have to keep in mind the other side of that - the protections around freedom of speech were put in place at a time when it was inconceivable that a majority of people in the country had the ability to be seen and heard _by the majority of other people in the country_. In near real-time, anytime. And that they could do so in a way that meant often they did not have to accept any consequence for the wider-ranging effects of their words.

Separately I also have to wonder if the knowledge acquired as a result of that would have affected their framing. In particular the advances in psychology and group psychology, and in understanding how it's possible to use this instant mass communication to manipulate even people who are on guard against manipulation.

[mgkimsal]

> Are the phone companies allowed to lock me out if they don't like what I'm saying?

Possibly, although... you're paying for your phone service. You're not paying for parler, facebook, twitter, etc.

[Closi]

Parler were paying for AWS.

[8note]

You can send a letter in the mail, can't you?

[Closi]

Oh great, that totally resolves the dystopian nightmare we might be heading for!

[scsilver]

I mean, the UK is still has vestigial Monarchal components as opposed to the US constitution which was built from the ground up with severe limits and federation of power. We'd likely see that distopia in england long before the US justice system can adjust itself to allow it.