[threeseed]

> Concentration of power in media and online means only allowed views get through

Never in history has it been easier for someone to create their own media publication, present alternative views and make it available to anyone in the world. But rather than do that what those people prefer to do is rant, rave and demand that other publications carry those views.

Concentration of power in media and online is because the majority of people simply don't want to listen to the type of views that are typically censored. And since the media is a business the owners understandably listen to those people.

You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen.

[tenpies]

> You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen.

I don't mean you in the specific, but I am deeply alarmed by what seems like a coordinated regime effort to re-define free speech into what you describe above. Perhaps the WEF-affiliated Twitter CEO put it best on CNBC the other day: "freedom of speech, not freedom of reach".

So in effect, for the regime censors, freedom of speech now means freedom of expression + censorship. That is, as long as the censors allow you to put the words on paper, you have "freedom of speech" in their eyes, even if that paper is immediately thrown into a lead bottle and into the Mariana Trench. As long as your Tweet is not outright and immediately deleted, you have "free speech", even if the algorithmic censors immediately ensure that no one but you will ever see it.

This will not end well.

[MostlyStable]

The core of the problem is that many many people no longer believe in a culture of free speech. They think that, as long as it's not the government doing it (and even sometimes when the government is standing right over there, waggling its eyebrows and flexing its muscles), it is both acceptable, and in many places good for people to be punished for nothing but speech.

The first amendment is absolutely just a governmental restriction, but the concept of free speech itself absolutely must be more broadly protected. The new social media era of algorithmic content makes these waters murky. Because these platforms aren't just hosting content, they are picking and choosing who it gets shown to. It's a complex situation that isn't as black and white as some free speech advocates would like to admit, but before we can address any of those complex factors, I think it's vital to argue vehemently that free speech is a more broadly important value than just the first amendment.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

> it is both acceptable, and in many places good for people to be punished for nothing but speech

I think part of the issue is that the internet is practically only speech. Spam is just a lot of speech. Doxxing is just speech of a specific privacy. Advocating violence is just a form of vigorous . Rape threats and revenge porn… It’s all basically just speech.

It’s difficult to say we should have a free speech culture when we also have spam filters.

[GauntletWizard]

You should have a spam filter. I should have a spam filter. We, the collective we, should not. A ton of things should be done to prevent spam - a vast majority of spam is also fraud, and should be tackled that way much quicker than it is. The delegation to the government (or large enterprises) to "fix the spam problem" has resulted in our current state of innundation.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

Well now we’re back at that the right to speech isn’t the same as the right to listen.,, which is what the original poster was protesting

[version_five]

You make an interesting point but I think there are two separate issues.

Freedom of speech does not mean a requirement for people to listen or to have your ideas broadcast.

In general nobody should be compelled to promote your ideas. With Twitter and others, the issue is that they are monopoly platforms, and so by refusing to carry some ideas they are effectively censoring them and denying free speech. It would be like saying you can say whatever you want in a public square but some people need to wear soundproof masks when they do it.

All that to say, the issue imo is we need better laws around monopolies that include common carrier type rules that prevent their interference, not because companies shouldn't be allowed to censor, but because monopoly platforms shouldn't.

[Nathanba]

I think that's not true actually, freedom of speech absolutely implies a requirement for broadcast. Speech is in itself a broadcast, the intent is that you're supposed to be able to be heard - otherwise it would be called freedom of thought and everyone would naturally agree that that is not good enough.

We can quickly end up in a world where your ruler tells you that you have full freedom of speech just as long as this speech remains firmly inside your cranium and never leaves it.

The problem here is that the philosophical position is a bit more complex: Issues of decorum and harassment and spam exist, requiring limits on broadcast and so someone always has to judge what the true intent of your speech is. We now live in a world where people readily judge that the other side never has good intentions, therefore their speech can be forbidden. It's an intellecutal and moral problem, some people are simply incapable or unwilling to understand the other side's position or moral values to such a high degree that they reject any allowance for speech.

[arrozconcosas]

They’re missing the whole point of free speech. The purpose of it is to protect the type of speech people despise and don’t want to hear. This is important because the most evil form of censorship comes from examples like those quoted in the article above. The “limit reach” people effectively are explicitly targeting the very types of ideas that free speech was designed to protect. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. This is basic free speech 101 that is, or at least used to be, taught in high school.

[HardlyCurious]

Did you hear about Parler? AWS cancelled their service for violating their terms of service. This was allegedly because Jan 6th was planned on the platform, but it turns out Jan 6th was mostly planned on Facebook.

Also apple pulled their app from the marketplace when they were trending.

'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today.

[gochi]

>'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today.

You can do it today very effectively. Many platforms exist today that don't rely on any of the major conglomerates. It's really not difficult, you just don't get the niceties that the big players have the experience in providing.

[curtisblaine]

It's really hard to exist without a payment processor, and it's overwhelmingly hard to set up one.

[krapp]

>This was allegedly because Jan 6th was planned on the platform, but it turns out Jan 6th was mostly planned on Facebook.

"mostly planned on Facebook" doesn't mean "not at all planned anywhere else." There was a whole data dump of content from Parler showing that yes a lot of planning was done there. Here[0] is a Slate article about it.

>'build your own platform' is a lie. You cant do that without relying on other services today.

Weird, because Parler was recently acquired and will presumably be relaunched, Gab still exists, and Rumble and Truth Social and plenty of other "alternative" platforms are still active as far as I know. How is it that an entire ecosystem of platforms to serve the conservative and right-wing market has popped up if it's impossible to build alternatives to mainstream services?

I mean, for all of the censorship supposedly going on, the "dissenters" don't seem to be hindered in getting their message out at all.

[0]https://slate.com/technology/2022/01/parler-jan-6-capitol-fa...

[curtisblaine]

If I'm not wrong, Gab was cut off by pretty much all payment processors and had to launch its own to survive. There was a moment in which, if you wanted to give money to Gab, you had to either mail them a check or do a bitcoin payment to their wallet. They technically survived, but dissenters were - and are - greatly hindered at every step.

[Izkata]

Correct, it's called Gab Pay.

[threeseed]

Almost all of the people who were involved in Jan 6 have gone to jail. It was a serious crime.

And you can't expect companies to be wilfully complicit in criminal acts by allowing services like Parlor which you admit partly facilitated the Jan 6 event.

That said you can run internet services without AWS or Apple. Build a web app and host it on your own infrastructure.

[vixen99]

In this context, if genuine, this seems odd to me. https://twitter.com/ChuckCallesto/status/1689484345281478656

Not to be outdone, if you've not seen it in the UK we've had this much smaller rebellion: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/extinction-rebellion-pr...

[LightHugger]

Freedom to listen is a good right and arguably better than freedom of speech but you don't understand how it works. Freedom to listen means the censors don't get in the way. Facebook censoring a post from reaching someone who wants to see isn't "people not wanting to listen", it's facebook getting in the way of two consenting adults who want to communicate to eachother.

Freedom to listen requires freedom of speech, but also requires good blocking and filtering tools on the individual level. If the tools are not on an individual level, and you cannot choose to unblock or unfilter "dangerous" views, you don't have freedom to listen. By the way, we have this on hacker news, this is how the post flagging and dead systems work, you can just choose to see what's being moderated.

[toofy]

what you’re calling “censored”, on my forum (and even here on hackernews) and on countless other forums, we simply say “deleted.” and move on with our day.

from irc to bbs’, from forums to discord rooms, here on hackernews, from our own living rooms to restaurants/bars, if the person running the show finds someone obnoxious, they delete the comments or remove the person. this isn’t new, it isn’t surprising. it’s been happening since the beginning days.

are you looking for publicly owned internet infrastructure or something? if it’s a private space, how can you demand they host people they find obnoxious? how can you demand they ignore that they fought hard for their audience or diners at dinner time.

i get publicly owned spaces, i really do. free speech and all that, but i can’t imagine doing anything but laughing at someone if they ran into a restaurant, stood on the table, yelling “genocide races A, B, C now!!” at the top of their lungs, then screaming “censorship” as the owner removes them.

[curtisblaine]

> how can you demand they ignore that they fought hard for their audience or diners at dinner time.

Demanding that cloud providers and payment processors act as neutral channels doesn't seem that hard to me. The problem is not the bar owner removing the person, the problem is the person being effectively barred from opening their bar.

> if they ran into a restaurant, stood on the table, yelling “genocide races A, B, C now!!”

Well, that's an extreme example. Normally, what happens is that patrons get thrown out for saying things like "we don't want to use your pronouns" or "we don't think your theory of privilege is credible" or "we don't think make athletes should compete in women's sports".

[toofy]

the post i was responding to was specifically talking about facebook and social media sites “censoring” people, in other words, deleting posts and removing users. my post had nothing to do with payment processing. if someone comes to my site, countless other sites since the beginning of the internet, including hackernews, and just like always, if they are obnoxious, they’re banned, it’s not new. it’s not shocking.

and again, no one would think it was weird for a restaurant or bar to remove some weirdo. in fact, we’d think it was pretty hilarious if they were screaming “censorship” while being removed.

> Normally what happens is that patrons get thrown out for saying “we don’t want to use your pronouns” or…

i disagree. you can’t open a major social site and not see someone crying because some random person they’ve never met prefers “they/them.” it isn’t clear to me anyone can claim discussion of this is being “censored” when it is quite literally a massive amount of discussion a certain group of people are obsessed about. it’s trending regularly. censored?

unless by “censored” you mean, “people are using their own free-speech to talk back to me.” if this is waht you mean, we're at a fundamental disagreement on what "censored" means. i only ask because so much of the "they're censoring us! they're canceling us!" crowd, a large chunk (not all) but a large chunk of what they're crying about is just that people talk back to them, and since they're not used to being talked back to, they don't know how to assess whats happening. again, not all instances, but a surprising number of the instances i've seen.

if you want to discuss payment processors and infrastructure, then sure, id probably be on board with at least discussing the idea of nationalizing some of the critical infrastructure. removing privatization of critical infrastructure would certainly remove much of the private company discussions surrounding free-speech, and after some testing in the courts, we would likely end up with some strong neutrality and privacy clauses. for example, payment processing would likely no longer be able to remove payment processing from legal sex workers, which is probably one of the most (if not the most) attacked group of people online by payment companies.

but again, social media sites, forums, or basically any gathering place online, if you expect different behaviors than you get in “the real world”, such as when a restaurant removes a wild nutbag for screaming at their diners, if you expect any gathering place to be different, you’re setting yourself up to be let down. like it or not, online exists in the real world, complex human behaviors still exist there. like it or not, if a gathering place is full of real humans, whether online or offline, this will come with all of complexities and expectations that implies.

[curtisblaine]

> You can demand the right to free speech. You can't demand everyone has to listen.

You can't demand that everyone has to listen, but you can absolutely demand a neutral channel where people who want to listen can go to listen to you. People that don't want to listen to you can use that channel too, without opting in to follow you. Nobody is forced to listen, nobody is forced to be silent.

What you really want, instead, is that nobody should be able to listen to the speech you don't like because you're afraid that other people might decide they like it.

[version_five]

> What you really want, instead, is that nobody should be able to listen to the speech you don't like because you're afraid that other people might decide they like it.

Well said.

[jpmoral]

In many cases, it's not because you're (the general "you") being "suppressed". It's just that you're tiresome.

A few weeks ago someone was ranting about something (some movie he claimed was being given the woke treatment). I told him that he shouldn't get so worked up about it. In hindsight, his response should've been predictable. "Oh, so I'm not allowed to have an opinion?". I told him it was fine to have an opinion and share it, but that I thought he should just skip watching the movie and not get worked up about creative choices he disagreed with. I wasn't trying to "suppress wrongthink", I just found it very tiresome.

Edit: granted that wasn't about science, but I find the dynamic is often similar.

[curtisblaine]

Yeah, this happens on both sides. You just need to mention you disagree with creative use of pronouns, or with certain categories of sexuality, or with the unhealthiness of clinical obesity, or the understanding of privilege, and you're met with accusations of genocide.

[dotnet00]

This has nicely summarized my biggest complaint with how a lot of the fediverse seems to be intended to work.

Mastodon etc seem to mostly be designed with the intention of having a lot of large nodes that can federate. This results in the same issues as mainstream social media on those nodes. This also reflects in the lack of meaningful discovery tools.

Of course this is resolved by setting up ones own server, and there is at least a corner of the fediverse of truly free speech nodes. But this just makes me feel that the design should have always been towards a large network of small nodes, with associated discovery tools.

[gochi]

Neutral channels don't exist, never have never will. So the demand doesn't make any sense. By operating, the channel must make self-preservation decisions, these decisions cannot be neutral.

[toomim]

Yes they do, in the law:

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1003/neutrality...

[version_five]

Do you think telephones and email should be censored?

[Etrnl_President]

They shouldn't be; Everyone should have an equal chance to expose themselves as idiots. Censorship denies this.

[gochi]

Both already are.

[hackerlight]

> Nobody is forced to listen

This is an overly reductive take on how social media would work with no moderation (no censorship). Recommendations that show up on my Home timeline aren't all voluntary, I'm often reading things that I would prefer not to read. I don't have complete power to curate my feed. What a lot of people want is not more censorship per se, it's for this recommendation system to be changed in order to deemphasize polarizing and toxic content and promote less polarizing content. Basically, many of us want to alter the social dynamics (which were arbitrarily chosen in the first place) in a healthy direction, rather than ratchet up the censorship.

> but you can absolutely demand a neutral channel where people who want to listen can go to listen to you

Rumble exists, so even if they were censored on Youtube, they still have a "neutral channel where people who want to listen can go to listen".

> What you really want, instead, is that nobody should be able to listen to the speech you don't like because you're afraid that other people might decide they like it.

Pretty much yes, but this is a euphemistic/strawman take on the fears of those you're arguing against. I am indeed "afraid" that people will "decide they like" extremist content, thereby becoming radicalized and committing a terrorist attack or voting in someone far worse than Trump. It's not them liking the content that I'm afraid of. It's the secondary consequences of that liking. I want to stop those consequences from happening. Ultimately, the objective is to protect our freedoms, even if it means sacrificing a little freedom (of speech) in the here and now.

[curtisblaine]

> Recommendations that show up on my Home timeline aren't all voluntary

This is an orthogonal problem; I absolutely agree that recommendations are bad. Incidentally, many people "on the other side" (the ones you want to silence) agree with this, as they're constantly shown content they wouldn't otherwise consume, which in their case is mainstream and all-pervasive. This is exacerbated by the fact that, if they try to set up their social media, they get deplatformed by cloud providers, payment processors, etc.

> I want to stop those consequences from happening.

We have a law system to stop these consequences from happening. The moment an extremist acts with violence, they are stopped with violence by law.

> Ultimately, the objective is to protect our freedoms, even if it means sacrificing a little freedom (of speech) in the here and now.

And you get to decide which speech is dangerous and which speech is not, which ideas are dangerous and which ideas are not, from the height of your moral superiority, I guess.

[hackerlight]

> from the height of your moral superiority, I guess.

It is not about moral superiority, it is about wanting to prevent a bad outcome that will negatively impact me and my family. That's it, self-preservation. It's a realist and ideology-free perspective on the actions that I need to take to stop certain bad outcomes from happening. I've read enough history to know what happens when hate speech is allowed to fester and spread. The marketplace of ideas is an empirically bankrupt concept. Bad ideas are contagious and will spread and infect a population if they're allowed to. The downstream consequences of that are dystopian and we've seen enough speech-caused genocides to know this. Really, you are the one on your moral high horse. You feel moral outrage at someone wanting to moderate speech because it violates a sacred and untouchable value that is part of your moral system. Even though, ironically, you probably support libel laws and other current restrictions in America's current sociolegal conception of free speech. As long as the speech that's banned isn't hate speech, I suppose that's all fine and dandy.

I am not arguing from an ideology here, unlike you. This is a purely realist perspective. Free speech is a good value to have -- one of the best -- all the way up until it isn't. Just like any other freedom we have.

> And you get to decide which speech is dangerous

There are no easy solutions. The alternative is that the government decides, and that carries its own obvious risks. Although, maybe that would be better since it can be democratic. What I do believe is that the risks of your proposal (unfettered hate speech and the consequences of that) are higher than the risks of my proposal.

> We have a law system to stop these consequences from happening. The moment an extremist acts with violence, they are stopped with violence by law.

You live in a world where causality is simple. Person picks up gun and pulls trigger; person to blame. Reality doesn't work that way. That person was motivated by something. An ideology, perhaps. That ideology came from somewhere. Dylan Roof doesn't exist in a vacuum. Dylan Roof logs online and consumes speech. That speech motivates him to kill people. No doubt he also has mental issues, but it's the interaction of the speech and those issues that causes the outcome. That speech was as much to blame for the deaths as Dylan Roof was. It is all a part of a long chain of causality, and just placing the moral and legal blame at the very end of that chain will do nothing to fix the problem or prevent the next genocide from happening.

[OrvalWintermute]

I downvoted you and I want to explain why.

The public square, and the communication around it are controlled by BigTech, BigMedia, and are heavily beholden to Govt & BigPharma which means pushing provax, esg, and various other uniparty narratives. That means publications, and new sources, as well as social media, forums, instant messaging, IMs, email and many others are all censored. It is hard to reach eyeballs if all communications are controlled&censored too.

[danem]

He never said these platforms don’t feature any amount of censorship, or that certain types of content don’t face unique hurdles that other types do not.

The fact is, it’s still vastly easier today to disseminate your ideas — no matter what they are — than at any other time in history. Do you really think radio, newspapers, tv stations, and book publishers weren’t just as influenced by large corporate and political interests?

[threeseed]

It is nonsense that all forms of media and online sites are censored.

It is simply the ones that are popular that have and will enforce their own terms of service.

And that is because there is a proven, strong relationship between sites that do this and sites that are popular. Because again. Most people simply aren't interested in hearing the type of views that are typically censored.

[lasc4r]

I seriously doubt IMs and email are being censored. You sound like someone who gets their information from grifters that complain about censorship despite having huge audiences captured by masses of lazy thinkers.

[OrvalWintermute]

Please do not discount my experience.

On a high karma Reddit account I was warned by an admin about banning for a specific story they wanted suppressed, and the post was deleted.

On Facebook I have been blocked from sending specific links from 3 different URLs in IMs, the last of which was because it had a contrary position about the Ukrainian war (the website Southfront which is Russian govt affiliated) when I was talking with a friend of mine that happens to have a Ukrainian wife. We were talking about stories in the news in the West vs East and what was the actual story.

[Bud]

I didn't downvote you, because I prefer just refuting your argument. I do believe you made the argument in good faith.

But it's completely absurd. Was there a degree of platform moderation to attempt to reduce covid disinformation, or at least label it as such? Yes. But was there anything remotely resembling effective "censorship" that made it at all difficult to reach "eyeballs" with bogus antivaxxer narratives? No. Of course not. The claim is ludicrous on its face. We were all bombarded with BOTH sides throughout the pandemic.