[landryraccoon]

That's your choice.

Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars?

I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent. That doesn't mean other companies can't host that data, simply that I don't want any of my dollars to go to those companies.

If the vast majority of consumers also don't want to give money to companies that host that content, that's the hosting company's problem. The free market is speaking. Nobody is making it illegal for that data to be hosted, but nobody is obliged to pay for it to be hosted. So it seems to me that things are working as intended.

[madmax96]

That is the point of the free market. But deplatforming certain kinds of offensive content is regressive.

For instance, in the not-so-distant past many Americans found interracial marriage morally abhorrent. Wikipedia says only 5% of Americans thought interracial marriage should be legal in the 1950s. In today’s environment, that leads to deplatforming those who would’ve supported marriage equality. This is not something we would desire.

People are full of prejudices. I’m sure our grandchildren will look back in horror at ours. Let’s not deplatform them for that.

[spaced-out]

At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement aggressively used boycotts, protests, and shaming campaigns to push for racial equality.

[synergy20]

you're out if you still think about 'equality', it's all about 'equity' these days, 'equality' is no longer good enough.

[spaced-out]

Maybe that's your opinion, but you don't speak for everyone.

[synergy20]

it's sarcasm, sadly these days the main media and our school districts are all about 'equity', teachers are all re-trained to use equity instead of equality right now.

[throwawaysea]

The subtle difference you’re pointing out is significant. Equality under the law is moral and ethical. Forced equality of outcomes is immoral and unethical, and is just collectivist Marxism rebranded.

[IX-103]

There's a difference between disagreeing with a position and finding it "abhorrent".

Your evidence with regards to interracial marriages does not support your point. Whether "something can be discussed" is an entirely different question than than "do you support position X". The very fact that they were able to take a poll is strong evidence that talking about it was not verboten.

[pessimizer]

This is simply not true, and a strange argument. Child pornography is discussed because people find it abhorrent. US politics has largely revolved around the prevention of interracial relationships for at least a century and a half, so the idea that people didn't (and don't) find them abhorrent is bizarre and ahistorical.

[guythedudebro]

> US politics has largely revolved around the prevention of interracial relationships for at least a century and a half

What

[IX-103]

Again you are conflating finding the discussion of a practice as abhorrent with finding the implementation of a practice abhorrent.

[wslack]

Tolerance of wrong viewpoints is different than the active support algorithms give to discovering false content.

[throwawaysea]

It’s not “active” support if the algorithm acts in a content neutral fashion, for example based on engagement metrics. In such a situation, changing the algorithm to artificially not let allegedly-false content be discovered is actively supporting the opposing viewpoints. Leaving the algorithm to act without artificial content-specific modification is not active support. Tolerance would be leaving the algorithms alone.

[AlbertCory]

Former Googler here (11 1/2 years, including in Ads)

The idea that algorithms are "neutral" is laughable. There is a loosely organized group of activists out there who are aware of how these algorithms work and actively manipulate them.

"Engagement metrics" are nothing more than these people pushing the buttons.

[onetimeusename]

I don't really understand why tech companies, like Google, go so far out of the way to maintain the image of being neutral. I agree they have a right to censor content they choose for whatever reason but what I don't understand is why they try appear to be neutral about their decisions. It feels like everyone is aware of what is going on, even other commenters who support Google censorship admit they approve of the bias.

So why do tech companies cling to this line of being neutral when no one really seems to accept it and they themselves have no intention of being neutral? I feel like there wouldn't be any conflict about policies or complaints they have to deal with if they were more honest. Maybe it has to do with section 230. I don't know but I feel like we would be better off if consumers had more information.

[mindslight]

Every MITM-as-a-service starts off by being a neutral conduit to attract users, and then slowly adds restrictions to appease advertisers. But users never appreciate additional restrictions, and so Google (et al) have to keep marketing themselves as general hosts lest they lose even more mindshare.

[nobody_at_all]

There is a difference between opposing viewpoints and factually incorrect information that is destructive.

If your view is based on provable falsehoods, your view is worse than valueless.

Tolerating these people is harmful to everyone, but that is not why Google is banning it. It is because it is harmful to Google's bottom line.

At the end of the day, Google owns their servers and can say what is allowed and what is not.

[peytn]

Google is a legal construct. I can’t go have a coffee with Google. I can’t get a high five from Google. Google will do whatever our laws say it has to do in exchange for liability protections for its owners.

[amanaplanacanal]

If you can find a majority to agree you can change the laws. It seems unlikely though. I’m not even sure what you would change the law to be. Current reading of the US constitution says that Google has the same free speech rights that you do.

[swayvil]

>Google owns their servers and can say what is allowed and what is not.

Well that's the problem in a nutshell. It ain't good for our society.

[takeda]

They are not there to improve society, they are there to make money, and if you think different you are a fool.

Republicans fought to make companies people, and to be not regulated. And now are crying when it fired back, because forcing a company to publish or block something is actually stepping on its first amendment right.

You won't really have such platform, unless it is done through a well established non-profit or through government (as long as government is Democratic and checks and balances work correctly).

[nobody_at_all]

What do you lose by not being able to post or upload files on a Google-owned server?

People act like being banned is a life threatening event.

[jjeaff]

I disagree. I think the algorithms are fundamentally immoral because they promote content that gets "engagement". Which includes and in many cases prioritizes content that people have engaged with because it causes a negative response. Rather than pushing good* content, it prioritizes lowest common denominator, reality tv, desperate pundit, fast food, self congratulatory, outrage porn garbage.

*By good, I simply mean thoughtful, high quality, factual, educational, or otherwise uplifting content regardless of politics

[ShroudedNight]

I don't think "Good" is unambiguous enough to trust the platforms to promote it. How about simply "related"? Show people the content they've explicitly asked for. If people explicitly ask for outrageous content, then fine, but we needn't force feed it to society.

[XorNot]

Algorithms don't work like this though: content that feeds outrage disproportionately outranks content which doesn't.

Algorithms don't discriminate "content" by it's actual content: they keyword match and look for clicks, and build a pretty perfect radicalization pathway more easily then they build a discourse [1].

You have probably experienced this: almost everyone has the experience of wanting to see some particular YouTube video, but opened it in an Incognito tab (or just avoided it) explicitly because they know the topic will prime the YouTube homepage to fill with nothing but things you don't want to see.

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/youtube-fa...

[obedm]

I always think I can draw the line in the sand as a very rational and relatively well read person.

But then I remember that the best thinkers the world has ever seen (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, ad nauseum) were never able to look beyond their noses to see the human suffering of others.

Aka, they were perfectly happy to have a society run by slaves, to ignore the plight of the poor and sick, etc.

[jampekka]

Perhaps these are the "best thinkers that the world has ever seen" because they said stuff that was beneficial for (some) powers that be. E.g. Plato-Aristotle-line/myth is directly linked to Alexander the Great.

Worth noting that there were very influential thinkers and entire schools of thought that looked beyond their noses. A good example are cynics/Diogenes the Dog, who may well have been more influential than the Platonic line. E.g. (as per anecdotes we have left) Alexander the Great had great respect to Diogenes, who totally ridiculed Alexander's (and Plato's) position.

Also stoics (e.g. Marcus Aurelius) are quite direct descendants of cynics and not ashamed of this at all.

More I look into classical philosophy, or the "myth" of academia, more it seems that it's mostly a fabrication of perhaps scholastics.

[obedm]

This is a very important point. Maybe there were some great philosophers in their time that argued against it and were ridiculed or didn't reach us through time.

I'm curious what you mean by being a fabrication? Their ideas were real and they've shaped history throughout time one way or another

[jampekka]

Fabrication is perhaps too strong a term, but the separation between history and myth has not always been that strong. For example it was common (and accepted) to write stuff in some famous person's name.

I don't think it makes the content itself any worse, but it's difficult to know what was really historical.

I don't formally study this, but such problems become quite apparent when I try to e.g. find out historical sources for some philosophical statements or anecdotes. Probably not that different from how people attribute all sorts of "smart stuff" to Einstein.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudepigrapha

Edit: by "scholastic fabrication" I mean that scholastics spent a lot of time "interpreting" especially Aristotle (and tried to make it compatible with the Bible). I'm guessing a lot of what we think is "greek philosophy" may be from these interpretations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism

[obedm]

Thank you for the clarification. I'll read more on the subject.

History is god damn hard. That's why it's useful to read the source material whenever possible.

I don't know how many times I've seen The Parable Of the Cave being used, but reading The Republic, really makes you understand what Plato meant with that story.

It's hard for most people to read that stuff though. I've only scratches the surface. It's easier to trust others to donor for us and distill the information.

And in each century, the lessons learned from the same material may be different too.

[idiotsecant]

You're making the mistake of assuming morality from your current time, place, and culture is universal morality. You find slavery morally objectionable because the current cultural understanding is that slavery is morally objectionable. Future obedm might find it equally abhorrent that you, for example, routinely consumed the flesh of sentient animals or openly released carbon into the atmosphere for personal gain, or probably a million other things that will be completely unimaginable in polite society 500 years from now.

[obedm]

Haha you mirrored the argument I've made many times before. The eating meat part I feel is likely to be the thing that will change.

But that's an obvious one. What else will be seen as "barbaric" that we don't even think of challenging?

Working 8 hours a day? Having kids? Going outside or staying inside?

I remember the Greeks were not big on private property and instead took great pride in their public buildings. The polar opposite of our society now

[throwaway210222]

> I remember the Greeks were not big on private property

Then you first have to make something other than private property the backbone of average peoples' pension funds.

I don't have ideas, you?

[jjeaff]

That may be true of Plato, Aristotle, etc. But one thing I have learned from history is that there is almost always a contingent of people that do find terrible things like slavery abhorrent and were even outspoken about it. But if you are an elite, and benefit greatly from something, you are probably much less likely to be outspoken against it.

[obedm]

I've never heard of any ancient philosopher being abhorrent about slavery and the like and I've read that there weren't any.

Could you point to some readings if you're aware of it? I'd love to know

[MatteoFrigo]

Seneca had a somewhat more humane attitude towards slavery. See e.g. https://figsinwinter.medium.com/seneca-to-lucilius-47-on-sla...

[hutzlibu]

And then from inside your link, there seemed to be even more critical voices:

"Then again, the Stoics were famous for challenging common conceptions, and the founder of the school, Zeno of Citium, had declared slavery an evil in his Republic"

[jjeaff]

Most philosophers likely come from the elite classes in the past. You don't have time to sit around and think and write if you have to worry where your next meal comes from.

[XorNot]

> In today’s environment, that leads to deplatforming

In the historical environment it led to people being killed by the neighborhood mob when they decided to lynch the black man[1]

In todays environment it leads to genocide[2].

It is morally laughable to compare deplatforming to the consequences of the free spread of misinformation, propaganda and hate rhetoric.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States#...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

[acituan]

We’re not talking about individual choice but an inherent ir/rationality in censorious behavior.

Vast majority of the consumers probably make pragmatic rather than idealistic consumption choices. Eg when you source a new iPhone, you source certain unethical labor practices. When you make use of the US dollar, you make use of some amount of atrocities that built its international purchasing power (eg any of the petrodollar wars). I bet those rarely bother even the most so-called “idealistic” consumers because a) it is a hard calculus to compute b) it is impossible to live when every “impure” thing is removed from use.

The difference with public content hosting is being able to twist arms to make them take down stuff and conform to an image of virtuousness which we narcissistically and psuedo-religiously identify with. It is not about the real damage the contents pose, it is our intolerance to being seen as a “person who can use such sites”. The threat is to our confirmation bias, in this case the confirmation of an idea that there is a clear right and wrong and we are definitely right.

[landryraccoon]

I'm confused. I don't see the problem. What's the difference between the image of virtue and just virtue?

If the majority of people believe that images of virtuousness are what they want, then that's just what they want. People aren't computing the outcome, their ethics are based on appearances and always have been. The internet doesn't change that fact. Whether it was in the middle ages or the post-industrial period or today, virtue has always been performative. So I don't really see what you think your argument demonstrates.

[oceanplexian]

What does the “Majority of People” mean?

The enlightenment concept of free speech is likely a minority viewpoint among the people of the world. However I also think it is the correct view and that corporations or governments looking to censor speech are infringing on human rights, and believe in fighting for it the same as I would fight against racism, slavery, religious discrimination, authoritarianism, and so on. Just because a lot of people believe something is ok does not make it right.

[acituan]

> What's the difference between the image of virtue and just virtue?

What’s the difference between a real car and a perfect cardboard replica? One has functionality and interiority. The other is just exteriority.

In the King Midas story, he wants everything to be mindlessly golden and thus turns them into unusable shiny crap. He got the golden exterior alright, with none of the real goldenness, goodness they would afford him.

[landryraccoon]

Your example is a bit facile. A cardboard car does not function as a car does. It sounds almost like you are saying something but you never explain exactly what’s wrong with performative virtue.

But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”. The young people of today are no less virtuous than their elders, despite the fact that their elders (like virtually every generation before them) complain that they are immoral.

[lodi]

But "performative virtue" is--definitionally--fake. If it were real, it would just be "virtue". (And similarly, "political correctness" is something not quite correct--otherwise it would just be "correctness"!)

It's an actor "performing" as a character for a few hours, and then reverting back to their original personality.

> But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”.

No, strictly speaking you don't have to define anything. Whatever virtue is, it's consistently that. "Performative virtue" is inconsistent, often hypocritical, and therefore inauthentic.

> The young people of today are no less virtuous than their elders...

I can't speak to virtue in general, but with regards to duplicity it does seem like there's increasingly more of it:

1) young people still have access to whatever methods of duplicity old generations had, and can additionally virtue signal on social media on an unprecedented scale.

2) it seems like it's simply becoming acceptable to lie. Politicians will directly contradict their own video evidence, multiple times a day, and everyone shrugs and moves on. We've given up on norms of discourse and civility. To be clear, I'm not surprised that lies are being told; I'm surprised that there appears to be zero interest or any repercussions.

3) objective truth itself is under attack. It's becoming normalized that anyone can say whatever they feel at that moment and that they have "their truth" and I have "my truth". This is incredibly dangerous.

[acituan]

> A cardboard car does not function as a car does.

That's exactly the point. It is contrasting the appearance of the thing vs the structural & functional organization (logos) of the thing. Without the second, it is not the thing. One cannot establish an identity relationship just based on appearances. That is why you can't equivocate the appearance of a virtue with being virtuous.

> It sounds almost like you are saying something but you never explain exactly what’s wrong with performative virtue.

"Performative" virtue, a more accurate designation would be "demonstrative virtue", is an oxymoron. You cannot be virtuous without conforming to the structural & functional organization of the thing, i.e. without really being virtuous. Real virtue is a participatory endeavor. A display of virtuosity is like the cardboard car, it doesn't function as a virtue. Making people take down content for narcissistic reasons does not make the world a better place, because it is devoid of at least two core properties that is rationality and proportionality.

> But you have to define what is virtuous before you can claim that performative virtue is “fake”.

This topic is systematically discussed since Aristotle, and you would appreciate the absurdity of trying to give an exhaustive definition in this forum. But I've given you two properties of it that narcissistic censoring violates.

[nobody_at_all]

You start with a faulty premise: google services are public, so you have no valid point.

Build your own data center and upload anything you want. Don't demand that a private company give you an unfettered soapbox.

Also "source a new iPhone"? Can we dispense with the meaningless buzzwords, please?

[ineptech]

> Isn't the point of the free market that consumers are free to vote with their dollars?

Can you pinpoint the moral difference between "Google should be allowed to refuse to host content that they dislike" and "Restaurants should be allowed to refuse to serve ethnicities that they dislike"?

It is a feature of free markets that consumers choose where to spend their money; but it is also a feature of liberal societies that the law precludes the majority from driving out an unpopular minority by refusing to do business with them.

[theandrewbailey]

> I don't want to give my money to companies that host things that I find morally abhorrent.

Isn't that a sign of a moral panic? Back in the 90s, my parents didn't want to patronize companies that signed deals with pornographers. Even though I was only 10, that sounded ridiculous. Good luck finding any large company that doesn't.

[landryraccoon]

I don’t see what’s changed. Youtube doesn’t host pornographic content either. The Apple App store doesn’t allow adult content of any kind. If you’re saying maybe Youtube and the Apple store should grow up a little and allow adult content I’m sympathetic but the horse has long left the barn on that one.

[eurasiantiger]

> Youtube doesn’t host pornographic content

While they don’t host porn, they do host a host of porn performers.

[Chris2048]

Did the local utilities (water, electric) refuse them to pornographers, and did you parents boycott those?

[jjeaff]

Just how many modern companies do you think are actively dealing in pornography?

[lostlogin]

Can you explain this? Are you referring to tech only? Maybe I’m way too oblivious but of the large companies I pay money to I find it hard to imagine that most are signing deals with pornographers.

[michaelmrose]

If people wont do business with people who do business with pornographers what right do the pornographers or porn aficionados have to object. If it would render it more clear it wouldn't matter if the subject were avocados. It's not a moral judgement on the worthiness of porn its about consumer choice in aggregate.

[jlawson]

No, because just a handful of companies control the entire ecosystem. There is no alternative, you cannot escape their influence and you cannot function without interacting with them.

If Google and Apple ban you from their products and platforms, and Visa shuts down your payment processing, there is nowhere to go. You're done. This and much more has happened many times.

You're making the "just build your own internet bro" argument.

[michaelmrose]

Why can't you do business with cash/money orders and run a website on your own hardware exactly?

[GekkePrutser]

Doing the money order thing is so inconvenient these days that 90% of consumers will just skip you. It's simply not practical.

[rOOb85]

Sounds like they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work harder.

They could also accept checks via the mail. Or cash via the mail. Or cryptocurrencies. Or gift cards. Or barter. There are multiple options available to them.

[GekkePrutser]

Those things are all really inconvenient.. Really, who wants to go out and mail something and wait for it to arrive? And gift cards risk the same kind of banning of credit card companies. This is going to limit any business beyond inviability.

The only thing you mention there that is a serious alternative are cryptocurrencies. And those are constanly fluctuating, needing very complex hedging against sudden value changes. And still something that most consumers will really struggle with. Most will not have a clue how to obtain crypto or how to deal with it (safely).

It might work for a really highly educated niche, but not for 99% of consumers. They just want to put in their paypal or credit card details and click buy now.

[nobody_at_all]

I don't do business with either Google or Apple.

I don't need them to do anything at all.

There are competitors to Visa.

I can do anything I want without Apple, Visa, Google and even Amazon and Microsoft.

[sib]

>> I can do anything I want without Apple, Visa, Google and even Amazon and Microsoft.

Really? How can you even know which services or products depend in some way on GCP, Azure, or AWS (not to mention product and services that are built using other services that depend on those)?

[nobody_at_all]

Why do I care if some service uses them? I severely restrict service usage anyway.

[sib]

> Why do I care if some service uses them [GCP, Azure, AWS]?

Because you said

> I can do anything I want without Apple, Visa, Google and even Amazon and Microsoft.

So if "some service" that you use uses them, then you're not doing anything you want without them.

[nobody_at_all]

I rarely use services anyway because it is typically a bad idea to get so intertwined with software that I can't control.

[mason55]

But I think we need to examine both sides of this.

When the American concept of free speech was coined, it was valuable because you could go stand in a government owned square and communicate your message for free. It was a good balance between not forcing private companies to accept speech but still allowing the speech to happen.

Online we don't have the concept of a government run square, and so your speech can be totally stifled by private companies.

But the difference is that when you're standing in the town square shouting nonsense, your reach is constrained, your ability to reproduce your speech is low (you have to just stand there and keep shouting) and everyone knows who you are. Damaging speech just can't be that damaging. Online is totally different.

I think the argument of "Google can't censor you, only the government can" is not great because there's no gov't equivalent of the town square. But I don't think the answer is just "make Google accept all speech" or "create a gov't equivalent of the town square" is necessarily the answer either. I think we should be starting from first principles and understand what free speech is trying to accomplish and come up with a framework that helps us accomplish it.

[tsimionescu]

Pretending free speech was only about the town square is ahistorical.

Free speech has always been about distribution as well - publishing a book or a newspaper, distributing pamphlets - those had similar reach to a random FB post or YT video today (in terms of percentage of the population).

Of course newspapers had no obligation to carry anyone's message, but, far more importantly, a newspaper couldn't be censored by government for printing stuff the government didn't like.

It's also important to remember that there used to exist many more newspapers - factories would have newspapers, most towns would have one or two, many clubs and similar organizations would have one.

[shkkmo]

The history of printing things for wide scale distribution well predates the first amendment and it is silly to pretend otherwise.

[inlined]

But the history of forcing those publications to host your opinion is unprecedented

[Turing_Machine]

Historically there were two modes of distribution, "publishers" and "common carriers".

Publishers (like newspapers) had full control over their content, and also had full responsibility for it (e.g., if they printed something libelous, they could be sued).

Common carriers (like the phone company) had no control over the content, and no responsibility for it, either (you couldn't sue the phone company if someone used the phone to plan a crime, for instance).

Google and their ilk want to have it both ways. They want the full control of publishers, and the zero responsibility of common carriers.

Historically, power without responsibility has invariably been a recipe for abuse.

I think they should have to choose one or the other.

[throwawaysea]

This is the point SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas made in his render opinion, that communication networks like social media should be regulated as common carriers: https://reclaimthenet.org/justice-clarance-thomas-big-tech-p...

[amanaplanacanal]

That’s the way it was until the passage of the communications decency act. Early social networks found themselves in a bind in that if they tried to moderate for say, spam, or porn, or copyright infringement, they were then liable for everything their users published. The CDA was an attempt to solve that problem.

I don’t have a better answer.

[nobody_at_all]

How can an endpoint, no matter how large that endpoint is, be considered to be a common carrier?

Justice Thomas is hardly a reliable source for making it so.

[13of40]

The impact of that is asymmetrical, though. A company that's making 1% profit (thinking a rural TV station here, not necessarily Google) can't afford to lose 10% of it's viewers, so they dial down their programming to the least objectionable possible. That's how we get in a situation where most people want to watch Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones but what they get are Brady Bunch reruns.

[LudwigNagasena]

There is no free market in big tech.

[TeMPOraL]

There's little free market for the consumers in tech in general. The barriers to entry are extreme - between inherent complexity of the products, enormous capital investments required, and scale-related benefits (economies of scale, network effects), few can afford to start a real competitor. You can't just make a new Facebook or a new smartphone or even a new coffee machine - not without making a faustian bargain with investors, a deal which is usually the root problem behind why technology sucks.

Consumers only get to choose out of what's available, and in this market, it's hard for an entrepreneurial consumer to make some things available when the market isn't providing them.

[teh_infallible]

I think the whole concept of “voting with your dollars” is flawed. Google will always have more votes than you.

[nybble41]

The analogy to voting to flawed in that actual voting is much too powerful, because it involves politics and the use of force. When you "vote" with your dollars your choices are to either support something or ignore it and spend your money somewhere else. The amount of support you can provide is limited by the economic surplus you've created, and no matter how much money you amass you can't just shut down something you dislike as long as other people continue to support it. Voting in the political sense lacks these safeguards: a majority (or vocal minority) can subsidize their pet projects with the opposition's resources, or prohibit harmless activities merely because they find them distasteful.

[derek_codes]

What? So because someone or something has more money than us, we should just say screw it and buy products we are morally against? That makes no sense.