Comment by SCHiM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SCHiM | Hacker News Reader

There they go again, the big nanny corporations. They are part of the social fabric of our society. The same rules of freedom of speech should apply there.

Saying that they have a right to censor their platform is OK, if this was the case from the outset. As it is, once these platforms were free and unrestricted. It's only after they grew big, are became protected by network effects that allows them to do stuff like this.

This is censorship plain and simple, it's disgusting, risk-averse behavior that displays a debasing obedience to safe money and corporate interests.

I don't know exactly why this angers me so much, party because it is a bait & switch like I said above. Party because it futile, users will simply go somewhere else. Partly because much of the content that I like to watch and learn about these days is probably on some goody two-shoe's shit list. I despise that they get to decide these things on platforms that have profited to much from an unrestricted and free Internet and online culture. They are hating the players, not the game.

>The same rules of freedom of speech should apply there.

If you want freedom of speech to apply in privately controlled media, you would have to compel them to distribute content they do not agree with, which is itself a violation of freedom of speech.

And this is the problem with a simplistic idea like "Freedom of Speech". It is not possible for everyone to hear everyone else's point of view, so some speech will always be restricted. Therefore, our society inevitably makes decisions about which speech to amplify and which to silence, and just because that decision is not being made directly by government, does not mean it is not being made.

In practice when people complain about censorship, what they mean is that these implicit decisions are not being made in a way that they like. And in saying this, I'm not trying to imply that their criticisms are wrong, or that they're being disingenuous or malicious in trying to change those decisions. I'm saying this to reframe the debate, because framing it as if access to speech can only be controlled by intentional malicious restriction prevents us from questioning the ways in which society already controls access to speech.

The most common way speech is restricted is economic. The rich can afford to amplify their speech, and the poor cannot. We have historically accepted this without question as an economic reality, but then the rise of social media gave us a glimpse of a world where economic restrictions are not as big a factor, and so when these restrictions start to re-assert themselves we question them.

People call it "censorship" and demand "free speech", because this is the most pervasive set of ideas we have to understand this dissonance, but the reality is we are always censored, and speech is never truly free, and unless we accept that, we will not be able to ask real questions about what kind of societal discourse we truly value.

> If you want freedom of speech to apply in privately controlled media, you would have to compel them to distribute content they do not agree with, which is itself a violation of freedom of speech.

People can advocate for social norms and different ethical frameworks without advocating for legal or regulatory changes.

> ...speech is never truly free, and unless we accept that, we will not be able to ask real questions about what kind of societal discourse we truly value.

They are called ideals because we cannot perfect reality, not because they are unimportant. There's nothing wrong with forming consensus about how things should work and then only doing what is reasonable to force that vision on each other. I don't see what part of that gets in the way of asking "real questions".

>People can advocate for social norms and different ethical frameworks without advocating for legal or regulatory changes.

Yes, but unless you're considering some means of achieving those social norms, even if that's just social pressure, it's unlikely to change anything. And when people do actually advocate means of changing the norms of discourse, people who don't like the proposed changes will call it censorship.

>They are called ideals because we cannot perfect reality, not because they are unimportant. There's nothing wrong with forming consensus about how things should work

I agree. The point I'm trying to make is that in practice "Freedom of Speech" is not actually a very coherent ideal.

If we just mean the government should not directly intervene to prevent speech, that's a reasonable ideal, and relatively few people actually disagree with that. But when people try to consider other ways in which speech is controlled, they still call it "Freedom of Speech", even when arguing for contradictory things.

And I'm arguing that the reason for these contradictions is that the debate tends to be framed in terms identifying speech restrictions and acting to remove them, rather than asking broader questions about the inevitable ways in which speech is amplified or silenced, and how we should structure discourse within those limitations.

> "Freedom of Speech" is not actually a very coherent ideal.

Sure it is. The ideal is that better ideas, not power, are the best response to ideas someone doesn't like. But there are certainly exceptions where power is needed to counter acutely harmful speech like "don't yell fire in a crowded theater" and "don't post stolen passwords".

Governments and corporations just have different interests and different amounts and kinds of power. So we have different norms and rules for what governments and corporations ought to do. But the general principle is the same.

> The ideal is that better ideas, not power, are the best response to ideas someone doesn't like.

But what does that actually mean in terms of how we structure discourse? "Better ideas" will do nothing if people are never exposed to them, so presumably we would like to structure things so they are.

Obviously we can't just identify the "better" ideas and amplify them, because the point is that people should identify them themselves. But if we don't amplify anything, it's likely people will not be exposed to them at all.

So perhaps we want to amplify things such that people are exposed to lots of different ideas? But everyone's ideas are slightly different, and we can't amplify all of them equally. Should we choose a selection of ideas, and amplify the best examples of them? How do we decide which ideas, and which are the best examples?

Or perhaps you have some other idea? I'm not trying to dismiss all the possibilities here, I'm just pointing out that statements like "better ideas, not power" get treated as simple and obviously correct, but are actually extremely complex when you get into details. And we quickly find that people understand these supposedly guiding principles in very different ways.

It makes sense when you use the term censorship to apply to something like the government, which has a monopoly on violence and can literally jail or kill the people being censored and can apply that standard universally.

It does not make sense to apply it to someone's private property, especially when people are free to continue their speech somewhere else.

Summed up elsewhere, they are not being denied the right to say a certain thing, just the right to say it in a specific place (Reddit or Youtube).

What these people call 'censorship' is more accurately described as 'house rules'.

> It does not make sense to apply it to someone's private property, especially when people are free to continue their speech somewhere else.

The Supreme Court has held that effective bans on rights are also unconstitutional. And I think that's a fair standard to apply in a broader ethical context.

You can say "go somewhere else to share your views", but if the only real places you can speak are in places you own, that's not much of a consolation. "Free speech" implies conversations where everyone can hear. It's not "free speech" to write yourself notes on your own napkin or to scream into your own pillow.

I think its entirely possible to have a public discussion in a privately maintained and owned forum. And the principle of free speech would have us, as much as possible, set up free discussions where the all ideas can be heard so the best ideas can be adopted.

> Summed up elsewhere, they are not being denied the right to say a certain thing, just the right to say it in a specific place (Reddit or Youtube).

YouTube has been running at a loss for over a decade. This has allowed it to become a monopoly and have undue influence on policing speech.

Censorship like this is an abuse of their monopoly privilege. The most appropriate free market solution is for the government to forcibly split YouTube off into a seperate company and let it compete in the marketplace.

In addition we can remove safe harbor provisions and start holding them responsible for the shady other content they don't remove.

The most compelling argument is that Reddit and Youtube cannot pretend to be content agnostic hosts if they are actively censoring. Either they take responsibility for their content or not.

> The ideal is that better ideas, not power, are the best response to ideas someone doesn't like.

Better ideas do not win -- ideas that are proclaimed the most or the loudest win. This is the problem we currently have.

That's a fair point. A very undemocratic one, but it is a cogent reason to not value free speech. Though if that were true, we'd be looking for ways to limit keep especially dumb or naive people from participating in elections. I don't get the sense that anyone, including YouTube and Reddit, is seriously proposing that.

I'm not sure why you took it to that leap.

I value free speech -- everyone is free to share their opinions. But speech isn't distributed evenly. It used to be that only the very wealthy or the very organized could widely distribute their speech. Now it's very wealthy and anyone with far too much time on their hands. This is not a better situation.

People can now wield speech as a weapon -- not by spreading better ideas -- but by simply using so much that it drowns everyone else out. Your own speech online is literally worth less because you're not willing to spend hours every day posting it.

Well, your premise is that people are too ignorant, at least sometimes. You don't blame them for being ignorant, instead you blame bad actors for creating the ignorance, but regardless liberal democracy still rests on the assumption that the populace is qualified enough to make important decisions.

To put it another way, maybe we're overconfident. Maybe the citizens, at least in aggregate, are well enough informed, but they just value things differently. To be more specific to the case at hand, maybe citizens are mature enough to handle tobacco ads on the internet.

Citizen: "Let me see those cigar ads."

Censor: "I can't let you do that. You'll just buy cigars!"

Citizen: "Well, yeah. That's the idea."

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