Replace "censoring conservative viewpoints" with "censoring the nice people who tell me about how I can make $13,000 a week working from home". Which part of this argument changes? I can't find any part that does.
For me personally, since I run my own incoming mail server, there is no platform censoring those emails. I use my own tools, trained on my own emails and my own choices about what to block, to do the filtering.
When a platform entirely blocks some speech, that is not my choice; it is theirs. That is the critical difference.
This is still not a bright shining line, because there isn't one. But it's sufficiently clear to be a guiding principle. If you want to lock yourself in some particular filter bubble, that's your choice, but nobody else has the right to force you into one.
Have you never encountered a phpBB forum, or a wiki, or a social network, that doesn't have spam blockers? In my experience, such sites are inundated with spam, occasionally to the point that signal is hard to find over the noise. Your "solution" only touches on email. Filtering spam from such diverse sources would require a much more intrusive technology. Also, you're putting a wholly unreasonable burden on website owners to preserve abusive content -- if somebody uploads a flood of junk data, are you legally required to retain and redistribute it all? And are you forcing users to download gigabytes of garbage, and filter it down to a kilobyte of content?
We're not talking about a phpBB forum or a little blog with a few thousand commenters. We're talking about single companies with very significant fractions of the total discourse flowing through them. If Facebook blocks something, it affects a massive number of people, and "just go make your own Facebook" is not a suitable recourse. Scale matters. Small entities can do things without being a threat to the body politic that large entities can not.
As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced that something the size of Facebook can actually work in the long term [1]. Trying to jam everybody into one set of rules may simply be infeasible, for reasons not entirely related to "rights". If you look at the current conflicts over Facebook through this window, you may find it makes sense over the conflict. Especially if you are one of the majority here on HN who are kinda lost over the idea of why so many have become anti-Facebook, when you just see Facebook imposing your perfectly sensible, obviously correct values on the world, why is everyone complaining? Well, it's that whole diversity thing you may have heard rumors about. It's real. It may not be the case that you can get everyone into one community with one set of standards, regardless of how "obviously right" those standards are.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146868 - in fact, I'd amplify the original post I made by also pointing out Facebook is international, so we're not just trying to stick the diverse cultures of the US in there, but trying to stick all the diverse cultures of the world in one big pile. When I put it that way, does the idea that such a thing could work in the long term even pass the smell test?
I listed examples including "wikis" and "social media sites" which categorically contain the largest websites in the world. You'll find websites of all orders of magnitude from tens to millions of users -- where do you draw that line? But more importantly, are you under the impression that large-scale sites are somehow immune spammers?
> As a pragmatist on this matter, I believe the solution here is scale. The control I have over a phpBB forum is that if I don't like their spam policy, I can leave, and either join another or form my own.
I'm not understanding something here. You think that it's okay for spammers to implement a "heckler's veto" by de-facto shutting down every single niche website that (by law, presumably) accepts/rebroadcasts any and all submitted content -- that you'll be able to "vote with your feet" and move/create a site or forum that will somehow be immune to this onslaught? At what point is "scale" the answer? Bigger is better?
> As I've said before, I'm not entirely convinced that something the size of Facebook can actually work in the long term [1].
I'm suffering whiplash. You gotta help me here. You're happy to feed small websites to the spamwolves, yes? But you're not convinced that big websites are good either. Do we just cancel the entire internet?
I'll grant that I'd probably get more work done.
Yes, this doesn't deal with things like "is YouTube ranking biased" but it's a start. You posit that sites would be obliged to publish onslaughts, but many spam filters are pretty good at filtering such attacks. For instance that's where CAPTCHAs came from (there are better technical solutions than CAPTCHAs but you get the idea).
Though for the benefits of others, I'd point out that a careful reading of my post reveals that I did write something that implied strongly that small forums have more freedom in their spam blocking than large ones do. The idea that I'm obligating websites to never filter anything is some bizarre idea klyrs has gotten a hold of and apparently doesn't plan on letting go of.
You can think this, but it's not borne out by legal precedent. Odious speech is protected in public spaces, so if the KKK wants to impose their speech on my by disrupting my morning commute they have that right as long as they get a permit.
And if an anti-abortion activist wants to shove gory images of fetuses in the face of everyone going into a Planned Parenthood to get their prescriptions refilled, nobody stops them from doing that either.
I think (note that phrase) that in the 21st century, this is an exceptional historical case for the rare communication medium that attaches communication directly to physical location. Almost everything else we do nowadays has personal control involved, and we should consider that the more common case.
It also is not as unregulated as you may rhetorically claim. They are allowed to say odious things, but, at a reasonable volume level (or they'll be shut down for being a public nuisance regardless of the contents of their speech), and they are not allowed to jump in your face and stay there (in which case it's assault, again, regardless of the content of your speech). Moreover, I'd observe that you're mostly hypothesizing, as indicated by your own phrasing, and I'm a lot more pragmatic on this matter, so I don't feel the need to solve problems that don't (currently) exist. I don't think anyone's been more than mildly annoyed by public speech in a long time. (Being annoyed by the content that someone disagrees with you is part of being human. Trying to "solve" that produces worse problems than the original problem.)
One is that people arguing about politics in political discussion forums are using the forum for its intended purpose whereas spammers are abusing it (in fact, stealing from it, since it makes its money through advertising). I’ve yet to see anybody oppose removing political discussions on forums about woodworking - that’s not what it’s for.
There's also a clear (direct) profit motive, and it's depriving people of property. There's lots of ways this argument changes. When you censor political views, you're depriving people of their rights. Shutting out a swindler isn't even close to the same thing.
One is fraudulent spam, the other is not.