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Comment by toofy | Hacker News Reader

> If these norms continue to getting eroded, god help us all — it may set humanity and the western civilization back by hundreds of years.

Haven’t these norms already been well established? I mean, almost every business which deals in exposure to humans sensory inputs has always seemed to have standards. Concert venues, magazines, record companies, night clubs with stages, publishing outlets etc etc... all of these business owners have always been able to pick and choose what types of output they send to the humans consuming that output. Hasn’t this always been the norm?

I’m just curious why some insinuate this is an enormous step backward when from my perspective it would seem to be SOP for a society which idolizes private property.

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I just made an argument about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18765494.

> The difference is that the internet has discontinuously more scalable network effects, so technology companies often find themselves in a winner-takes-all dynamic. If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users.

> This effect is new. These platforms are private entities, but effectively they operate as public commons. So culturally we must treat them similar to public commons where it isn't acceptable to kick out quirky characters because some of us don't like what they have to say.

If some publisher, newspaper, or literary magazine refused to publish Walt Whitman, he could always try and find another publisher. But if Twitter bans Titania McGrath, there is no other Twitter for her to join because the next best alternative has 1/10000th the number of users.

This is pretty much exactly wrong (the situation is basically the exact opposite). When there were a very finite number of publishers in the English speaking world and self-publishing barely existed, an idea that could not be published would only diffuse by word of mouth. When Henry Miller could only be published in France, his works were only available to a very small number of individuals even if many could be interested.

Anyone banned from every single media site still can create a website, publish on Tor, etc. The inability to get a million followers is far from the inability to get your ideas heard. The argument confuses an inability to make money with an inability to be hear (and feel free to argue about the right make money with incindiary ideas, that obviously has a different implication).

By creating the ability to bypass publisher, the Internet produced a situation where far more ideas could be heard than previously. That situation still exists (for good and less-good). The average person still depends on filters but those filters are voluntary and a substantial portion of people know they can bypass them if they wish. And I'd say present days are also wider than earlier filters.

The problem is if you do set up your own website, a very small number of companies you choose from can each decide to deplatform you, and very soon unless you're unusually technically savvy you will be unable to speak your message.

While I'd deplore everything about it, I would note that the most well American fascist website was online when I checked a moment ago. And I'd note that the effort deplatform that site occurred because it was quite well known and truly obscure publications are much less likely to get that treatment (for good or ill).

Which is to say that net now certainly makes a wider range of views available to those interested than ever before. There's still individual apathy or skepticism keeping people from sample this Niagara but that doesn't seem like the worst. Many people like their platform filtering out racist garbage and hey, that seems like not entirely terrible.

But the contrast is that in a small city in the US in the 1950s, a person would have to physically leave their location to get more "risque" or "extreme" publications of any political stripe.

Who knows though if it's left up at the request of law enforcement as a sort of "fascist bug zapper" where they get attracted to the electric light and then zapped. A few isolated examples of free speech being possible by highly undesirable groups doesn't necessarily mean what it looks like.

I don't see a problem with law enforcement keeping their eyes on individuals who talk openly about committing heinous acts of violence, considering in the case of the current alt-right, this talk has boiled over to into vicious act of terror and murder (Portland, Charlottesville, etc).

That free speech allows people who advocate crimes to be watched hardly by itself is hardly argument that this isn't really free speech.

I mean, to some extent, I think it's OK fascist have some venue for their expression. That having such a venue should benefit them rather than being an opportunity for them to hoist themselves on the own petard really doesn't seem like something they can demand.

I also don't have any problem with it. That wasn't my point. My point was, isolated instances of unacceptable opinions still having a platform isn't enough to prove that all unpopular opinions still have platforms available.

Again, this seems to have been the norm. There have always been venue operators or publishers who have a significantly larger audience than their tiny similars. If Emma the Anarchist wanted to be published in the early 20th century, she wasn’t being published by the era’s Wall Street Journal, she was published in small homegrown publications.

I mean, I do recognize the scalability and network effects, but I’m still not convinced it is any different from the distant past or the recent past.

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