[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.

[swayvil]

Not "like life threatening" - Bad for our society.

In that free public conversation is centrally crucial to the sanity of our society.

And having that public conversation controlled by a profit-seeking entity is definitely detrimental to that conversation. And thus detrimental to the sanity of our society.

And an insane society is obviously all kinds of threatening.

[x86_64Ubuntu]

The truth of the matter is that the right-wing userbase of HN is deathly scared of being marginalized in wider society. Seeing things like Parler getting kicked off of AWS, Facebook Fact-Checking moderation and now this makes them scared.

[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.

[jampekka]

It's usually next to impossible to read the real source material, as it's in literally ancient language and written in context and for purposes that are hard to understand.

For most things it probably doesn't matter that much. For example classical philosophy (or its common translations/interpretations) provides a sort of "shared language" for academia, regardless of how historical it is. That's why I tend to think it more as a myth unless there's something specifically historically intetesting.

Most of the classical stories, e.g. the Cave, have "transcended" the original context anyway, and are in a sense richer nowadays.

[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"

[obedm]

He acknowledged their existence but as far as I know, he, not anyone else, said that slaving people was "wrong" or shouldn't be done.

It's important to note that Ceneca and the famous stoics (Marcus Aurelius for example) were rich and benefitted greatly from the status quo.

[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...