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by WoahNoun 934 days ago
One is a company freely deciding what it's product should and shouldn't do and the other is forced by the government.
4 comments

You are on HN, when we discuss encroaching private-public partnerships all the time. Not that long ago, WH got in trouble for encouraging suppression of some news items over others[1]. We are already at a point, where the difference between corps and government is more of a legal abstraction than a reality ( legal abstraction circumvented by that partnership, but that is a different rant ).

There is no difference.

[1]https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/08/politics/twitter-hearing-hous...

>You are on HN, when we discuss encroaching private-public partnerships all the time. Not that long ago, WH got in trouble for encouraging suppression of some news items over others[1]. We are already at a point, where the difference between corps and government is more of a legal abstraction than a reality ( legal abstraction circumvented by that partnership, but that is a different rant ).

Can such discussion take place in China?

Is that a relevant argument here? I am being serious.
Sure it is. Being able to question the state of things is a large difference.
Is it? If the questioning does not result in any meaningful difference, did we actually question anything?
From your own link:

>[Twitter] officials emphasized there was no government involvement in the decision.

>“I am aware of no unlawful collusion with, or direction from, any government agency or political campaign on how Twitter should have handled the Hunter Biden laptop situation,” Baker said in his opening statement. “Even though many disagree with how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden matter, I believe that the public record reveals that my client acted in a manner that was fully consistent with the First Amendment.”

Well there ya go, they said they weren't aware of anything. Case closed.

Anyone can go read the reports and judge for themselves what happened.

I don't see how anyone could go through it and think there was no collusion.

(not that I agree with this whataboutism used to distract from the initial criticisms of the CCP oppression)

If there was any actual evidence, they'd be in jail for lying to congress.
Interesting theory, but what do you call the emails and slack channels where government employees requested (and usually received) banishment or limiting of targeted users?

Are you under the thinking that no coordination happened, or that the coordination that did happen is legal and expected?

Trying to understand how you didn't get to the same conclusions.

Just picking a random snippet from the Files, here's part six:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1603857534737072128.html

How is that not government collusion with a private company to censor US citizens?

The testimony and article was about the removal of a nypost story about Hunter's laptop. Not that they are never in contact with government officials.
This company knows that if they don’t do some things or their product causes harm to people they will get some and or more regulation from the government.

So they are different flavors of government intervention. Definitely not exactly the same.

They are both the same.

Edit: to people who downvote, can you tell me why it is different? Aren't companies in USA censoring fearing governmental reaction, and the same for chinese companies?

> Edit: to people who downvote, can you tell me why it is different? Aren't companies in USA censoring fearing governmental reaction, and the same for chinese companies?

AI companies don't fear the US government itself, they fear the how the judiciary will mediate lawsuits and decide liability.

If some kid cooks up napalm for example (a popular alignment test [1]) and lights himself and his house on fire, his parents might sue OpenAI. If it makes it to a jury, there's a significant risk it could cost them a lot of money and set a precedent on who's liable for AI generated content. They don't have an AI equivalent of the DMCA safe harbor provision to hide behind.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35630801

They're censoring fearing the vagaries of fickle advertisers.
No, they fear that enterprises won't buy their product.
the user experience is the same which makes it odd to be vicariously offended by that